Speed kills. From a career perspective, life only goes in one direction: up, up to the very top.

Up, up to the very top. Where is up, anyway?

In his play Push Up 1-3, Roland Schimmelpfennig shows a longitudinal section of the headquarters of an international corporation. Here, success is calculated according to storeys. Committed, flexible, creative and above all ever-younger employees vie with each other to get a job on a par with their boss as quickly as possible. Speed kills.

The ‘economic adventure’ does not make any provision for losing. That’s for people who are inflexible, who are unable to rise to the challenges of the information society. When everything seems possible, nothing is certain. ‘Push Up’: like doing push-ups, it is wearing to constantly push yourself in order to push up the rate of your ‘stock’.

Hans, the 60-year-old manager whose experience and performance no longer count in a ‘new company culture’, spends long nights on his exercise bike fighting ageing, the pounds and failing because of his young competition. Frank, his younger adversary, shares his loneliness with ‘Natascha’, a pay-per-view pornographic image file from the internet. For Robert and Patrizia, two junior employees spoiled by success, a random hook-up becomes a sensation that spices up the dismal office routine – until they realise that they are competing for the same position. Even top performance is no guarantee for professional survival. Angelika, the CEO, fires Sabine, her best head of department, because she threatens to outshine her.

In the new world of work, the boundary between public and private is blurred. In the thick of the fight, no one questions why they are fighting and who their victims will be. Heinrich and Maria are the only exceptions: they are doormen who oversee the battle zone without fighting themselves. Because they have nothing to win in the global competition and little to lose but their jobs. U.M. 2002