About the work
“Der Untergang der Titanic” (The Sinking of the Titanic) is a verse epic by Hans Magnus Enzensberger subtitled “A Comedy”, published in 1978 by Suhrkamp. Enzensberger began the poem in Cuba in 1969; the manuscript was lost in the post on its way to Germany, and he rewrote the work in Berlin, completing it in 1977. Wilhelm Dieter Siebert turned it into an opera; a stage version directed by Jan Philipp Gloger is scheduled to open at the Volkstheater in Vienna on 12 December 2026.
Plot
In 33 cantos, modelled on Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, the poem circles around the sinking of the luxury liner in April 1912. Cut into it is revolutionary Havana in the late 1960s, where the dream of a better life under communism falls apart faster than expected. The collision with the iceberg thus becomes an image of convictions breaking on reality.
Cultural significance
The work is read as an allegory of the failure of Western civilisation and at the same time as a bitterly ironic reckoning with the revolutionary utopias of the 1960s. Because of its shifting perspectives, periods and tones, critics have often compared it with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. An English edition appeared in 1980.