Zygmunt Bauman's book, Modernity and the Holocaust, argues that the Holocaust was not an aberration from modernity, but rather the most extreme symptom of a distinctively modern pathology. Women are conspicuously absent from this indictment of modernity; Bauman, a socilogist, mentions neither gender as an issue nor women as individuals. This gap in Bauman's text is in fact full of meaning, for the absence of women as persons does not preclude the hidden presence of gender as a category of analysis. I shall use the absence and presence of gender in Bauman's text as a starting point for an examination of the historiography of women and gender and its relevance for our understanding of the Holocaust. First, I will tease out the hidden, gendered implications of Bauman's theory; second, I will look at the ways in which recent feminist scholarship has approached the question of women's responsibility for the Holocaust. Finally, I shall suggest that a consideration of the cultural construction of gender, as explored by recent scholarship in many fields, is necessary to our understanding of the historical and ethical concerns that Bauman and others have raised.

Within the voluminous literature on the Holocaust, a trend has emerged in recent years: a shift of focus from remembrance and commemoration of this horrible event to serious reflection about its significance in a variety of theological, philosophical, historical, and even aesthetic contexts. This shift has not been an easy one, for its practicioners have had to face the widely held view that the Holocaust is unintelligible or incomprehensible, and that the tools of scholarship are simply inadequate to grasp it in any meaningful way. This view is certainly understandable when uttered by those who have personally survived the Holocaust—voices which played a leading role in the literature of previous decades. But even as these voices recede in time, the obstacles which this event poses to intelligibility remain formidable to many scholars.

Among the most haunting features of the culture of murder created by the Nazis are the ruthless efficiency and sheer scale of their success in killing millions of human beings. There are those who link both to the earlier efficiency and scale of death in the titanic and grinding battles of the Great War. And there are others who would associate both with the alternatives of quick or lingering death promised by nuclear war. Efficiency and scale seem common to the mass death produced or proposed in the twentieth century, and many observers view both as attributes of the process of modernity.