Der Untergang der Titanic, or, in English, The Sinking of the Titanic, is an epic and allegorical

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 poem by the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Hans Magnus Enzensberger , is a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He has also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr. He lives in Munich.- Life :...

, first published by Versepos in 1978.

The poem is primarily about the failure of Western civilization as an enterprise, a point which Enzensberger makes explicitly in the passage about Icelanders

Iceland

Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

, who, when their properties are threatened by volcanic lava flows, endeavour to stem the inexorable tide with hoses:

pointing more and more hoses at the advancing fiery lava

[..] and thus postponing,

not forever perhaps, but for the time being at least,

the Decline of Western Civilisation

Similarities and parallels have been frequently drawn between this poem and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

, not only in terms of the subject matter but also in the way in which shifts in mood, perspective, time and voice conspire to move the reader to a single overwhelming point. The poem was adapted into an opera by Wilhelm Dieter Siebert

Wilhelm Dieter Siebert

Wilhelm Dieter Siebert was a German composer. During his career he has written mainly for television and films, and also chamber music. He composed an opera Der Untergang der Titanic, which was premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1979.-References:* ...

.