Der Untergang der Titanic was published by Suhrkamp in 1978, with the English translation (by the author) appearing in 1980. It is Enzensberger’s most celebrated single work — a book-length poem in thirty-three cantos that uses the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as a multivalent metaphor: for the failure of bourgeois civilization, for the collapse of 1960s utopian politics, for the impossibility of representing catastrophe in art, and for the poet’s own loss of revolutionary faith.
The poem’s formal inventiveness is extraordinary. Enzensberger mixes traditional verse (including passages in terza rima, echoing Dante), prose passages, found documents (newspaper reports, survivor testimonies, technical specifications of the ship), and self-reflexive commentary on the act of writing the poem itself. The result is a work that refuses to settle into any single register or genre — it is simultaneously epic and ironic, documentary and lyrical, politically engaged and aesthetically autonomous.
Enzensberger began writing the poem in Cuba in 1968, during his period of revolutionary engagement. The original manuscript was lost (or possibly never existed — the poem is not entirely trustworthy about its own origins). The published version, completed a decade later after Enzensberger’s disillusionment with revolutionary politics, incorporates that disillusionment into its structure: the poem is about the failure of the poem as much as it is about the failure of the ship.
Collecting The Sinking of the Titanic
First German edition (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First German edition: $40–$100
- First English edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1980): $20–$50
- First UK edition (Carcanet, 1981): $25–$60