Ecoocatastrophe – the abyss time

We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction on this planet. The dimensions are comparable to the end of the dinosaurs – and we are to blame. SUVs continue to be bought and the fascist, which is now ruling the USA, is shifting against renewable energies and pouring oil into the fire of this burning earth.

Are we not bored with alarmism? Of these great dimensions? Who is still discussing solutions for climate change? Steppe formation in Germany, 40 degrees in summer and hibernation that wake up too early, then dying hedgehog – it is no longer a news to bring up something like this.

Levin Westermann’s autofictional narrator from his debut novel “Train Continuation” cannot accept all of this. He withdraws in the forest more and more, reads thick rollers for hours and excited them, writes essays about the relationship of man to the other animals and is stunned how much humanity destroys everything. To stop this, he finally calls for political violence. Westermann’s language is consistently unpretentious and clear. Where the anger cries, it is gently described. The title of tension is the restlessness that migratory birds captured when you feel that you have to leave an inhospitable place. Isn’t it all like these birds? Some want to go back into a transfigured past and the others want to solve the problems and build a new society. Either way, here, nobody wants to stay in now.

Why too? Westermann’s protagonist observes global elites, which with space colonialism, digital hybris and racism distract from planetary destruction: »Part of humanity had decided that everything had long been lost, because otherwise the behavior of corporations and nations was often not explained. So the ship was not approaching the iceberg in the first place, but had already rammed it and sank and so it was only necessary to avoid panicking and to disguise it for as long as possible. «

For “train continuity”, Westermann, who previously occurred primarily as a poet and essayist, received the highly endowed Lower Rhine Literature Prize. In his poems, the trees and foxes disappear the protagonists through a setting civilization.

“Our insignificance in the face of the time, this was a motive that had been working for years and whenever I thought about the topic for too long,” writes Westermann, “grasped me a kind of dizziness whether the primal staff and cycles that continued to form and design it. Vertigo. The abyss time. ”The non -fiction author John McPhees assigns the history of human history to the fraction of a millimeter on his geological time scale.

Westermann looks right there, into the past and the future without us. Glacier has scratched the New York areas completely empty in the past 10,000 years. At some point the next ice age will come and with it the glaciers will return: “Hundreds of meters high, they will hike south to bury everything to ground everything – transforming human traces into dust.” There is: Vertigo, the dizziness from the abyss of time.

If the glaciers then go back, future geologists would find high concentrations of metal in the rock layers: “The remains of our water pipes and cables.” In Westermann’s thinking, the end of humanity is always certain, but the awareness of transience does not lead to hedonism, but to consideration: We are not the navel of the world and we share this planet with several other ways of life.

Is there a monument for the monument to the development of the Corona vaccine somewhere? For Westermann, dealing with these primates represents our ongoing moral failure: “There was no place in the system for the suffering’s suffering, and I was pretty sure that the discoverers of the vaccine in their speeches had not given the monkey in their speeches and shareholder meetings, whose infected body had reached fame and wealth.

“Truition” is a kind of literary conscience that you can open. The reader wanders into the foggy forest, which is depicted on the cover and realizes, the deer that stands there, places legitimate demands on us humans. Will we be able to fulfill them? And does that depend on human civilization on this question?

Levin Westermann: Trainful. Matthes & Seitz, 192 pages, born, € 22.