Incontri al Corso 18 – Levin Westermann

INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 is a series of events in which the scholarship holders, who live and work in Via del Corso 18 for two months at a time, present their projects in an open dialogue with Gregor H. Lersch, Director of the Casa di Goethe, and the audience.

The poet Levin Westermann intends to lay the foundation in Rome for work on a new cycle of poems dealing with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, viewed through the lens of our present-day civilisation threatened by climate change and global warming. How would the Romans have reacted 2,000 years ago if they had been told that their world was coming to an end? The streets buried, the temples destroyed, 99% of all texts lost forever? How would we react? Against the backdrop of climate change and the dramatic changes it brings to life on Earth, the author is preoccupied with the themes of permanence and transience in connection with the topos of grief. Grief is seen here not as an individual reaction to the loss of a person, but as a collective phenomenon. It is about the work of mourning the measurable loss of species, ecosystems and landscapes in real time. Levin Westermann seeks to approach this theme through poetry, inspired by life and research in the “Eternal City”.

Levin Westermann © Bettina Wohlfender

Levin Westermann (*1980) studied at the Hochschule der Künste Bern and lives as a freelance writer in Biel/Bienne. He writes poetry and occasionally prose. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Schweizer Literaturpreis, the Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing and the Basler Lyrikpreis. His most recent books, farbe komma dunkel (2021) and Zugunruhe (2024), were published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.

With the kind support of