“You can kill the ghosts—that’s the imperialist fantasy.”

– On Johanna Tinzl’s »The Wrongs of Back Then«

Johanna Tinzl's installation »The Wrongs of Back Then«/»Das Unrecht von damals« consists of four sculptures in public space. The sketch-like faces measure approximately one and a half to two meters in diameter and are made of solid, untreated steel pipes. Tinzl has installed the sculptures in Regensburg, in southeastern Germany, along the pedestrian path on the banks of the Danube in the city center. Not far from the Iron Bridge, two of them sit with their backs to the street-side railing, while two more face the embankment toward the water. They are as though drawn in a single stroke—like oversized children's drawings—and seem, despite their weight, to rise up from the water and the path that lines it.

The project takes as its point of departure the still vastly underdiscussed and largely unexamined history of slavery within Europe, spanning from Antiquity well into the Middle Ages—a period whose sheer duration one must first pause to reckon with. A history which, as abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, is fundamental to the project of European modernity.₁ Johanna Tinzl encountered this history in the “Regensburg World Heritage Visitor Centre”, where the city—“ennobled”, as the website puts it, as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site₂ since 2006—presents itself in a permanent exhibition. A panel lists the goods traded between the tenth and fourteenth centuries at this central trading hub, the “commercial metropolis”₃ of Regensburg: wine, textiles, soap, spices, tin, honey, salt—and slaves. Enslaved people appear there as one entry among many. Regensburg was, alongside cities such as Prague, a centre of the slave trade. Documents such as the Raffelstetter Zollordnung (Raffelstetten Customs Ordinance), drafted between 903 and 905, attest to this. Most of the enslaved people came from Eastern Europe; the Slavic population was referred to by the Latin sclavi, from which the German term “Sklave” derived. Moreover, the generic masculine form in the German language in this enumeration is misleading; it obscures the fact that a great many of those enslaved were women, with children among them as well.

For Tinzl, the sculptures are ghosts that stand for the wrongs of back then. Yet these ghosts are neither ephemeral nor elusive—they are massive. They persist: immovable in public space, in the very heart of a city that, like so many places across Europe, presents itself to visitors as steeped in history while continuing to blank out immense parts of it. Even where certain aspects of that past have been and are being addressed, others remain invisible.

“You can kill the ghosts—that’s the imperialist fantasy,” says historian of science Thomas Laqueur in a conversation.₄ Laqueur, who has engaged with cultural practices surrounding death, asks: How do we care for the dead? How do the dead of a society endure within its (official) culture of remembrance? How long do those who were violently killed survive in collective memory? The fantasy of preventing the dead from living on as ghosts—of eradicating them once and for all—is, Laqueur argues, an imperial fantasy. Ghosts cannot be made to disappear. And Tinzl’s ghosts, too, cannot be killed.