EILEEN BATTERSBYponders 'Titanic' and Gunther Grass
BASIC PRACTICALITY WAS lost in the splendour of RMS Titanic. Convinced that she was unsinkable, management of the White Star Line objected to mere lifeboats cluttering the elegant promenade decks, reducing the specified 64 to 16. That the glamorous Titanic went to sea with more than 2,200 passengers, ranging from 12 millionaires to European poor, many Irish among them, seeking a new life in America, and so few lifeboats, was insanely irresponsible. At 11.40 tonight, anyone with an interest in the ill-fated Titanic will experience a communal shiver as exactly a century will have passed since that April night when the mighty liner struck an iceberg noticed only moments before impact. There were stars but no moon; conditions were still, so still there was no helpful telltale ripple of water indicating the presence of an ice mass.
Titanic resembled a luxury hotel. It had no radar and depended on lookouts. The 3,000 mile maiden voyage across the formidable North Atlantic was conducted as an extended party, at least for those travelling First Class. The captain had never called a safety drill; the crew was unprepared for an emergency. In a ship in which the floral arrangements were executed with military precision, iceberg warnings were overshadowed by potential speed records. Bizarrely among the 705 survivors were two pet dogs. Memorials have been erected, books written, movies made and eyewitness accounts of how the propellers shot out of the water and the great leviathan upended briefly before sliding away under the surface of the water continue to speak across the years.
By 2.15 am on April 15th, Titanic had sunk, more than 1,500 had perished. That morning also marked the 460th anniversary of the birth of visionary Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, an inventor and designer. How would he have responded to Titanic’s ambitious design? The loss of the ship, built in Harland & Wolff’s famous yard in Belfast, where that city’s famous black humour is currently well represented by souvenir T-shirts proclaiming: “It was alright when it left here,” remains an iconic tragedy. Aside from management bravado and the failure of the Californian’s skipper to help, there is no one to blame. Ice proved the enemy just as it had weeks before when Scott and his colleagues died in the Antarctic, of which the world was then still oblivious. Yet when the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine on January 30th, 1945, with the loss of 8,956 civilians, of which 4,000 were children, along with 918 Nazi officers, there was no public lamentation. When the great WG Sebald opened the story of German wartime civilian loss with the firebombing of Dresden, German writers looked to their unwritten history. Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’s (right) Crabwalk (2002) is dedicated to the victims of the biggest maritime disaster of all time in terms of human loss. The Wilhelm Gustloff is neither glamorous nor romantic but apportioning blame is easier – war.