Titanic - Teil IV

»The shipping company whose president was also travelling on the Titanic and is among those who have been rescued – unfortunately, we are almost tempted to say. It is these people who saw this expensive ship, and all the intellectual effort which went into building it as well as the 800 sailors and 1400 passengers on board, as a great money-making operation. It is they above all who placed the safety of 2200 lives beneath their desire to compete with other companies. It is they who, for the sake of their dividends, have 1500 dead people on their consciences, together with all the distress this has brought upon families on both sides of the ocean. But ultimately not even this shipping company bears all the guilt for this disaster, but first and foremost the system of acquisition by which thousands of companies like this one are getting rich today, not only through shipping but across the whole spectrum of human labour.« (Karl Barth, Predigt am 21.4.1912 zu Ps 103,15-17, in: The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 28 (2007), 215).