By Wolfgang Wittenburg
Published: April. 6, 2012
It has been said that the previous one hundred years had been the most violent in human history.
We don’t know whether those living in earlier and equally turbulent times would agree with this, but sadly, we can assert that the number of human casualties and tragedies caused by man through wars, social unrest, genocides and so forth during that century were on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
Each of these has its own stories and legends to tell, but there is one that has burnt itself indelibly into our collective consciousness: Titanic.
What is her hold on us, even one hundred years later, and with so many other tragedies to compete with?
Is it the claim to be the greatest maritime disaster ever, the appalling loss of life, with only one out of every three of the 2240 passengers and crew on board surviving it?
There have been others since then with far more victims, and just as mourned by those left behind, but even these numbers pale when viewed through the lens of the first paragraph.
Does it have something to do with the scale of the technological achievement?
The greatest ship ever put to sea, taller than any structure ever built by humankind if stood on its end, a floating palace surpassing by far even the superlatives touted by other great liners of the day? True in 1912, but ‘bigger and better’ has been built since.
We have all heard it before: The overconfidence, from her now arrogant sounding name to the belief that no natural force could possibly do any fatal harm to this floating marvel of engineering.
We all know that her passengers represented a microcosm of society, from celebrities to rank and file, and we are now so familiar with their heroics and their apparent failings as if we had known them personally.
Titanic was the last hurrah of the overconfident but short-lived Edwardian age, it has been said, before the world lurched into the Great War only two years later.
Titanic was a bad omen, some claimed, alluding that her fate presaged worse was to come. That is hindsight, of course, even if the course of history proved them right.
The sinking and great loss of life was a shock then, but it was nevertheless no more than an accident as many before, both on land and at sea, during the frantic progress of the 19th and early 20th centuries, albeit of a magnitude never experienced until then and thereby severely denting the hitherto prevalent sense of invincibility.
What makes Titanic stand out is essentially the combination of four elements. Firstly, the simplicity of her story: The biggest, most luxurious, newest and presumably safest ship, her sumptuous first class suites and salons enjoyed by the glitterati of the time, the middle class comfortable in 2nd class, and her mostly poor emigrant passengers in steerage.
Secondly, this ‘floating Babylon’ as some called Titanic, was indeed a small floating city, a human scale we can grasp and comprehend.
We can imagine how thrilled those steerage passengers must have been, whose White Star Line passage on a much smaller ship was upgraded to this new luxury liner due to a coal strike, with priority of available coal obviously being given to Titanic!
Thirdly, because of the ‘names’ on board, the voyage was already well documented when it started, let alone after the disaster.
Fourthly, the gods-tempting hubris about the ship as manifested even in her very name, the belief that she was technology’s and therefore man’s final triumph over the forces of nature, unsinkable in fact, only to founder a few days into her maiden voyage on the cold hard face of an iceberg, still claims a place of its own in our collective memory.
Everything that could possibly go wrong did so catastrophically during that night, a sequence nowadays known casually as “Murphy’s Law”, and during all this dawned the grim realization of what it meant to have every conceivable luxury on board except enough life boats for all.
Titanic’s story is that of a Greek tragedy, or a more modern version of the Golden Calf, if you prefer. Is it any wonder that many believed, and still do, that her end was at the hands of a deeply offended God, a stark reminder to humankind as in the words of the great 18th century German thinker and playwright, Goethe, “For with Gods shall never compete mere mortal man”. (from “The Limits of Mankind”).
We can all identify with some of the adjectives and assertions in the above two paragraph in our own life and could no doubt add a few more.
In that sense we have all booked passage and are all fellow passengers on Titanic, some luckier than others, and that is why she will not let go of her hold on our consciousness.
That is why she continues to stir interest through thousands of books, articles, numerous plays and films and will do so in future.
Titanic is much more than a great maritime tragedy, she has become a metaphor for human aspirations, hopes and failings, and though her broken and mangled hull will slowly disintegrate on the ocean floor, we will all keep sailing with her into that fatal night forever.
Francois Leh says
Sobering thoughts. Thank you Wolfgang,
Graham E. Fuller says
Fine piece of writing, Wolfgang, especially with your skillful linkage to our contemporary lives and aspirations…
Graham Fuller