And when they tack on the rest of the expression, it turns Germans’ trademark tidiness on its head: “ Unordnung die andere Hälfte” (“And disorder the other half”). Yet, whenever you mention “Ordnung muss sein”, Germans are quick to mention another expression, “ Ordnung ist das halbe Leben” (“Order is half of life”). If you’re caught on the wrong side of the Ordnungsamt, you’ll get an Ordnungswidrigkeit – a misdemeanour. This is essentially a special police force that focuses on misdemeanours, which in Germany includes playing loud music during quiet hours, parking violations and enforcing when and how long your dog is allowed to bark (10 minutes at a time and no more than 30 minutes a day outside of quiet hours, according to a court decision). It’s also stitched on uniforms of the men and women who work for the Ordnungsamt (Germany’s Public Order Office). If everything is as it should be, then you’re “in Ordnung”. In English, that’s, “Are you OK?”, but literally, they’re asking, “Is everything in order?”. If you seem distraught, a passerby might ask, “Alles in Ordnung?”. Needless to say, Ordnung has slipped into everyday German vocabulary. “Order is considered to be a Prussian value on equal standing with fulfilling obligations, punctuality, hard work and honesty,” said Christina Röttgers, a German culture expert who helps international companies understand the German mindset to work with them effectively. The cover story, "Germany: Crux of Crisis", quotes Hindenburg shouting his “useful aphorism which serves him on all occasions” at Adolf Hitler while discussing politics. The expression became further tied to German culture when Hindenburg graced the cover of TIME magazine in 1934 with the exclamation “Ordnung muss sein!” printed underneath his photo. While there's not much documentation of the phrase in the centuries after Luther, a 1930 article published in The New York Times claimed that Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of the Weimar Republic, had made the phrase “world famous”.
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