Ordnung

Herbert Sladowsky is a construction engineer, albeit one without work for the past two years; he is married, has no children and lives in a bourgeois apartment in a bourgeois district. Yet the façade of West German 1980s normality is beginning to crack, and for Herbert Sladowsky first and foremost. He repeatedly yells “Get up!” first thing on a Sunday morning in the street, protests against social routines, resists expectations: at his new job, while walking in the forest with friends. With severity and clarity and without compromise, Saless shows the “disintegration of an individual” (Maurice Lahde), a stranger in a world that seems strange to him, built on repressing one’s own history, social coldness and emotional ossification. (mg)