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The Titanic Myth


By Sune Christian Pedersen

Since the loss of Titanic more than 3600 books have been published, all in their own way telling "the truth of the loss of Titanic". To this, more than 36 films, 360 monuments, and several travelling exhibitions may be added, and it is evident that Titanic has achieved a very special status in our collective memory.


This status was founded already during the first weeks after the shipwreck when a flood of postcards, broadsheet ballads, and eyewitness accounts were published, followed-up by the first books and films later the same year. Already a month after the shipwreck the first Titanic movie, "Saved from the Atlantic" by Etienne Arnaud, appeared - with actress Dorothy Gibson, a survivor from Titanic, playing the leading part!

Already in 1913, the first Danish produced Titanic film received its première, i.e. "Atlantis" directed by August Blom on basis of the German author Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel of the same title. The novel had actually been written before the shipwreck, but from the beginning the film was enrolled in the Titanic tradition. "Atlantis" was made on the steamship C.F. Tietgen of the Scandinavia-America Line, except from the sinking scene which was shot in the bay of Køge with a large model ship and about 500 swimmers as extras. The film was by the way banned in Norway where they found it in bad taste to turn a tragedy into entertainment.

Why just the Titanic?
It is evident that Titanic has been kept alive in our memory by sometimes massive commercialisation of the accident, not least in the wake of James Cameron’s Oscar-winning superfilm from 1997. On the other hand, commercialisation alone does not explain why Titanic became such a "saleable article". Why just the Titanic and not many other accidents where even more lives were lost? There must be something special about the story about the world’s largest, most modern, and unsinkable ship that went down with all its sumptuous luxury in the quiet, starry night.

A Prophecy from 1898
This is emphasized in an uncanny way by a short story titled "Futility, or, The Wreck of the Titan" about a large steamship that collides with an iceberg in the Atlantic and goes down one April night. It seems to be written after the pattern of the Titanic disaster– apart from the fact that it was written in 1898, 14 years before Titanic was lost! Since then many people has regarded the story as a mysterious omen of the wreck of Titanic, but the point can easily be turned round:

The author Morgan Robertson deliberately used symbolism that was characteristic of the time (a modern steamship, technology, the great ocean etc.). Titanic made such a sensation because it fitted so incredibly precisely into the symbolic ideology of the time. Robertson’s book illustrates how much the Titanic catastrophe symbolized the dangerous "vanity" of modern technology – to use the author’s own expression. The modern story of the Titanic contains a clear, limited, and tragic logic which enables us to handle it – just because we can understand it.


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