Manfred Schild

Just after clocking-off time, a woman storms into the men’s toilet of an office building. She is holding a pot plant in her arm and haranguing her husband, whom she has just caught getting it off with his secretary. But it isn’t her husband sitting in the toilet cubicle. He fled through the window long ago. And the other guy, he’s already been sitting there for hours because he can’t find the strength in himself to get up any more and return to a world that pummels him with the speed of the new age. And this, despite the fact that he is an important man who is supposed to spend his days making important decisions. Anonymously, like in a chat room, the two become close. He explains to her why his (until now) perfect life – his model life for the demands of the 3rd millennium – has suddenly become empty, untenable and meaningless; but he can’t show her his face. As a comedy is wont to do, Abgetaucht begins written in the tone of a swiftly flowing parlando, merely to end in a situation in which the participants, in the face of a world that is spinning faster and faster, are lost deep in the confusion of their own anxieties.