Titanic Exhibition

Today was the first day of Micaela, James and Emilie's two-week long Spring Break.  Rebecca still has Kindergarten, though, so it's the perfect time to do something that Becca wouldn't enjoy so much.  I had heard on the radio last week that there was a Titanic Exhibition in the nearby town of Wiesbaden, we made a point of watching Rose and Jack in Titanic during the weekend to re-familiarize ourselves with the tragic tale and then today we made our way to Wiesbaden.

We exited the underground parking garage right near the exhibit to the lovely view of a circus.

We were a bit surprised to see this tiger pacing around his enclosure.

It took us a while of wondering around to finally find the exhibit, which was underground and we just kept missing the entrance.

This photo outside the exhibit was the last one I could take of us as there was no photography allowed inside. Through the power of the internet, I can show some of the exhibit.

We were each given a Titanic boarding pass

Boarding the exhibit, going back in time to 1912.

I'll assume you already know a lot about the story of the Titanic, so I'll just include information that was news to me.

We got to stroll down a first class hallway.

Large model of the Titanic

Captain Edward J. Smith on the right and First Officer William Murdoch on the left.  The exhibit stressed Murdoch's heroism.  Murdoch's first order after the fateful collision with the iceberg was to close all the water-tight doors, an act which bought the Titanic two hours.  Had the water-tight doors been open, the ship would have sank in 30 minutes.

Later on, First Officer Murdoch was in charge of loading passengers into lifeboats.  On the other side of the ship, only women and children were allowed into the boats and some boats were being lowered to the water below less than half filled.  Murdoch had a different interpretation of the order "women and children only" and if there was room in a boat, men could also step in.  He preferred saving lives than sticking to rigid rules.  More than 80% of all the male passengers that survived owed their lives to William Murdoch.

He was last seen attempting to launch Collapsible Lifeboat A by cutting at the ropes holding the boat to the sinking Titanic with his penknife before a wave washed him into the ocean.  The film Titanic shows Murdoch committing suicide with his gun, and while an officer did do that, it is not believed to have been Murdoch. After film producers refused to take out Murdoch's suicide scene, studio executives later flew to Murdoch's hometown Dalbeattie, Scotland to issue an apology for this depiction to his surviving relatives.

There was a frosted metal iceberg you could touch to get an idea of just how cold that freezing water felt to those poor people that early April morning. I could only manage to hold my hand against it for about 20 seconds and ten minutes later, my hand still ached from that short encounter.

Sweidsh Third Class Passengers Edvard and Gerda Lindell. During the sinking, the couple jumped from the Titanic into the water and managed to get to lifeboat A. However, only Edward managed to get on board the lifeboat while one of the survivors, a Swede named August Wennerström, held Gerda Lindell’s hand for some time. The lifeboat was partially filled with sea water and the cold temperatures exhausted everyone quickly. In the end he could hold on to her hand no longer and had to see her go down. Her husband died on board the lifeboat.

A month later, a lifeboat was discovered drifting, full of water. It was the collapsable Boat A, still containing three dead bodies and on closer inspection....

....a gold wedding ring. It was was taken to New York and identified as Gerda Lindell's ring. The ring must have slipped off her finger as Wennerström struggled to hold on to her hand. I had read the story about the ring a few years ago and seeing it in person was just so sad. In fact, I was finding the whole exhibit just so sad. And our individual English-language audio guides had melanchody musical accompaniment from the film Titanic, which added to the somber mood.

A watch and chain, found on the body of Swedish passenger Carl Asplund, which stopped working at the time of his death. Many of the items on display were recovered from passengers' bodies.

More items from the Titanic. There were a few pieces from the ship itself recovered immediately after the sinking, but the only item on display that was brought up to the surface from the sunken Titanic (rediscovered in 1985) was a large chunk of coal.

I can't allow this short discussion to end without mentioning a few things that have always bothered me about the history of the Titanic.

The first was the folk/camp song that my older brother learned at camp when he was a kid and then sang to me: Titanic (Husbands and Wives) or It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down, written just a few years after the Titanic sank. Do you know it? The chorus is:

It was sad (It was sad), It was sad (It was sad),
It was sad when that great ship went down (to the bottom of the sea),
Husbands and wives and little children lost their lives,
It was sad when that great ship went down.

And because kids will be kids and like to change things up a bit, the last two times the chorus was sung, the lyrics changed to:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,

and then

Counselors and campers, little children lost their pampers,
It was sad when that great ship went down.

I remember, at the tender age of 6 or 7, being so troubled by the image the lyrics conjured up in the mind -- little diaper-less babies floundering around in icy water with their mothers, father, uncles and aunts....until they all died.

And I also recall in the mid-90s visiting the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta where there were advertisements for an upcoming Titanic exhibit. You could even pay for a special tour that included dinner -- the exact meal that was served to the First Class passengers on the last night of the Titanic's voyage. That seemed rather morbid to me. Only 38% of the people on board the Titanic survived. That "experience the Titanic's last meal" special event didn't sit well with me.

But here's the one that really gets my goat. When Micaela was in kindergarten, we went to her school's Fall Festival. There would be plenty of activities, crafts and inflatable fun, including what the flyer stated was "the huge Titanic slide."  I didn't realize it would be an actual slide of a sinking Titanic.

It really turned my stomach, thinking of how people slid down to their deaths, but David told me I was being silly and took pictures of the the kids on it.  It was really large and the highlight of the festival for the crowd.

I felt vindicated, though, when a few years later, someone wrote a letter to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution talking about seeing a Titanic slide at a different festival.  He was in complete disbelief that people thought this was OK and that re-enacting how so many people died should be a source of amusement.

Which brings me back to why I had a problem with it.  There were 2,223 people on board the Titanic when it sank.  Of those, 1,517 died, died in such a tragic way.   That number was brought to life for us at the end of the exhibit.  On the walls were lists of those who died.  Board after board of names, with ages listed, which just broke your heart. One set of names  were Third Class Passengers:

Lefebvre, Mrs. Frances Marie, 40
Lefebvre, Miss Mathilde, 12
Lefebvre, Miss Jeannie, 8
Lefebvre, Master Henri, 5
Lefebvre, Miss Ida, 3

I don't know. Maybe I need to lighten up. But having an inflatable slide memorializing how so many of these people died...I just feel they deserve more respect than that.