H. Hesse - The (Tall) Tale of a German Electrician

Report of a Survivor or Tall Tale?

Another strange book about the Titanic is H. Hesse, Der Untergang der Titanic. Bericht eines Überlebenden (4th edition, Pendo, Zürich, 1998) (The Sinking of the Titanic. Report of a Surivor). It was first published as a pamphlet in 1927, where and how is unfortunately not mentioned in the modern edition, nor is the original print run.

When I was discussing this booklet with Susanne Störmer many years ago, she told me that all attempts to find out more about the mysterious author has brought up nothing. Possibly, a real person of this name never existed, and the 'survivor's account' was just a clever way for the writer to make some money.

The edition available today presents the tale as altogether credible. The preface points out that this is one of two (!) eyewitness accounts of the catastrophe. I have not been able to discover who wrote the preface and whether it was part of the original pamphlet or was written when the tale was first published as a book in 1986. The booklet also includes a timeline, some photographs, an assortment of wireless messages about the sinking, and some very brief excerpts from Lawrence Beesley's account. Presumably his is the 'second' eyewitness account mentioned. Framed as the tale is by an assertion of authenticity and actual documentation about the Titanic the unsuspecting reader may well think that the main part is authentic as well.

The Night of the Sinking

Without further ado, the narration moves to the night of the catastrophe. Hesse has just finished repairing the telephone of a first-class passenger when the ship hits the iceberg. When he notices that the engine has stopped, he rushes outside. All he can see of the iceberg is a vague shape far behind the Titanic due to the high speed the ship had been travelling with. When he reaches the engine room, nobody is aware of any damage. The general opinion is that the engines were stopped because a bearing had run hot and made a halt necessary. Then a greaser shows up to inform them about the ship being holed.

This part of the tale bears a striking resemblance to the way Max Dittmar-Pittmann describes the events. Part of the description, for example that the ship had already left the iceberg behind, could be based on a common source and the logical place for the iceberg to be (though there are accounts that put the iceberg almost on top of the Titanic). The detail about the bearing overheating as a possible explanation, however, strikes me as too odd to just accidentally appearing in two different versions. After all, it is hardly likely that the engines were stopped for a mechanical problem like this without the engineers knowing about it. Not to mention the fact that if a ship of the size of the Titanic had to stop when one bearing got hot, it was truly badly constructed.

After spending some time running around the ship, Hesse offers his help to the 'third lieutenant' who is in charge of loading and lowering the lifeboats. The officer sends him below to fetch 20 steerage passengers. The rest of the steerage passengers are held back by crewmen to stop them from storming the boat deck and making an orderly loading of the lifeboats impossible. Hesse mentions that he saw one shot first-class passenger and while he did not see the crewmen using their guns to hold back the steerage passengers, he heard shots fired and was told that they did by surviving passengers.

Hesse finally jumps into the sea and after some time comes across an upturned lifeboat. 'A folding metal boat from the wireless room', as he describes it. He manages to climb on it, finding himself in the company of a group of people including John Thayer, one of the wireless operators and the 'third lieutenant' Lightholler (sic).

Hesse describes the sinking of the Titanic as he claims to have observed it from the upturned lifeboat, the people crowding up to the stern, one of the funnels breaking off, the great noise as everything inside the ship breaks loose. This noise lasted 'a few hours' (einige Stunden), which I am inclined to see as an error in typesetting for 'a few seconds' (einige Sekunden). Hesse does mention that several people spoke of an explosion or that the ship broke up, but he did not witness any of it. He also describes that he heard earlier several shots fired on the ship, at one point even a volley of shots, he presumes that people who were too afraid to jump into the water or realised that their situation was hopeless anyway shot themselves.

While Hesse and his companions drift around on the upturned boat, he relates the heroic actions of the fifth lieutenant Löwe. (Picking up a couple of dots on the 'o' may be a typesetting error. After all, 'Lowe' is not a word known in the German language, 'Löwe' however is, meaning lion, which in a way is quite fitting.) Löwe rounds up several boats, though he has to threaten some of them to follow his orders. ('I have two guns. Come here or I open fire!') He takes a half-empty boat to which he transfers back to the site of the Titanic's sinking and rescues 18 people. Later on, he sets up a sail construed from some oars and blankets and sails to the Carpathia picking up another seven men and one woman from another 'upturned' lifeboat, meaning presumably Collapsible A.

When the Carpathia finally shows up, Hesse and his companions have to wait (very impatiently) for a boat from the rescue ship to fetch them. On board of the Carpathia Hesse meets a colleague, Lockwood, who survived the night by standing on a raft. He tells Hesse that the first lieutenant Murdock shot himself and that they had had Captain Smith on the raft, too, but that he jumped into the sea again when the Titanic sank.

It's a tall tale

The 'survivor's account' of H. Hesse is obviously not a survivors account. Whoever wrote this little tale did, however, do some research. The author must have read Max Dittmar-Pittmann's 'memoirs' published a year earlier, but also some other accounts, since some of the events reported are based on what really happened, even if Hesse reports them in a rather contorted form. A point in case is the description of Officer Lowe's, in his guise as fifth lieutenant Löwe: Lowe did in fact round up several boats, transferred his passengers to the other boats and returned to pick up survivors. He also managed to get a sail up and sail his boat to the Carpathia. However, he did not threaten the passengers in his boat with a gun (only some rather mild 'strong language'), and the sail was part of the boat's equipment, not made up of oars and blankets.

As I already stated above, the most likely explanation for the existence of this booklet is that somebody in 1927 wrote it to make some money out of the story. Perhaps the author or the publisher was even inspired by the success of Max Dittmar-Pittmann's pamphlet and lecture tour. That the book is even today still sold as an 'eyewitness account' shows that this attitude has not changed since then.

The reason why Der Untergang der Titanic by H. Hesse was in print much longer* than Ein Menschenalter auf dem Meere by Max Dittmar-Pittmann may be partly due to the fact that it has the magical word Titanic in the title and while Dittmar-Pittman's account has not. Another reason may be that Hesse's account is solely about the Titanic while Dittmar-Pittmann only devotes one short chapter on it.