"We live in a time without utopias," declared intellectual historian Enzo Traverso. "The traditional relationship between past and future has been broken." Traverso, professor of political science at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in France, spoke on "Historical Time and the Politics of Memory" Nov. 8 in Goldwin Smith Hall as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture series.

Before the 20th century, memory was a transmitted experience from one generation to another, Traverso said. "This continuity of traditional societies has been broken. Our representation of the past is now mostly shaped by the cultural industry, much more than by inherited ideas and cultures."

Traverso contended that because the world today is dominated by images, historians of 20th century culture cannot limit themselves to written sources. "When we speak of cultural memory, we refer to a world in which images are permanent. We have a visual representation of World War II because of movies and pictures."

As examples, Traverso examined two Italian films, Roberto Benigni's 1997 "Life Is Beautiful" and Gabriele Salvatores' 1991 "Mediterraneo," both of which presented Italy as victim rather than aggressor in World War II. "We can view these movies as symptoms of a foreclosed memory in which an entire dimension of the historical past is denied and replaced with a mythical interpretation," he said.

Traverso pointed out that the legacy of the 20th century haunts the present as "an inescapable, traumatic, catastrophic past made of wars, totalitarianism and genocide. The present is thus suspended between 'a past that won't go away' and a future that cannot be invented or predicted except in terms of catastrophe."

To demonstrate how the past is constructed from the present, rather than unfolding along a linear, chronological path, Traverso showed examples including the 1528 painting "The Battle of Alexander," in which Persian soldiers wear Turkish uniforms and Macedonians appear as European soldiers.

The 1939 Nazi propaganda painting, "Tank," juxtaposing German tanks and Prussian cavalry, shows that the fusion of mythology and technology at the core of Nazism is also "a fusion of the past and the future into a totalitarian, eternal time," he said.

In an interview, Traverso emphasized that historians should take into account the motivations of all actors of history, though it's not an easy task. "In order to understand the Holocaust we have to understand the mental landscape of the executioners," he said. "The tendency today is to focus attention on victims, yet there are a multitude of actors who were not victims who should be reintegrated into our representation of the past."

In his introduction to the lecture, Timothy Campbell, chair of Romance studies, said that "in Traverso's view, only memory is capable of imbuing political ethics with a sense of historical responsibility. That relation of memory to historical responsibility runs deeply through his work and accounts for its profound ethical tonality."

The author of 10 books, Traverso is the fall 2011 Luigi Einaudi Chair in International and European Studies at Cornell. He will speak on "European Memories, Entangled Perspectives" Dec. 2 at 3 p.m. in the A.D. White House.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.