The politics of shipwreck.

On Sunday, as part of its extensive coverage of the Costa Concordia foundering off the coast of Giglio, the Corriere della Sera published photographs of other ships which had come to a sticky end. The pictures were accompanied by brief statistics. I had always assumed that the number of lives lost in the Titanic disaster -1,523 - was by far the greatest to befall a passenger liner in the twentieth century. I was wrong. The Lusitania is the other liner whose disastrous end most people are aware of - 1200 lives lost thanks to a torpedo launched by a German submarine. Although the Titanic holds first place in public consciousness as the most tragic of maritime disasters one may well feel that the Lusitania's fate is even sadder. Its passengers' lives were lost not through human error but through human wickedness - the deliberate destruction of a defenceless passenger ship by the beastly Germans.
 Yet the Lusitania was not the only unarmed ship deliberately destroyed by an enemy submarine. On  the 30th January 1945 nine thousand people lost their lives when their ship was torpedoed in the freezing seas of the Baltic. Until I read about it in the Corriere this disaster had completely passed me by. And I wonder why: six times as many people perished as those who died in the Titanic. Part of the answer of course is that the Wilhelm Gustloff was a German ship which, in the words of the Corriere, was 'evacuando personale nazista in fuga' - evacuating fleeing nazi personnel -  though in fact many of them were civilians. I think the real reason for the Wilhelm Gustloff  being consigned to the scrapyard of history is not so much that some of its passengers were nazis but that the Americans weren't involved. Although the Titanic and Lusitania being British explains why we remember their fate, the truly significant fact is where they sailed to rather than where they sailed from. American culture dominates the world, so America's tragedies are projected by Hollywood to fill a global screen leaving those of other nations in the outer darkness of oblivion.