The phrase is American, from Louis Sullivan. The building tradition that carried it furthest was German — the Bauhaus, and the functionalist architecture of the Weimar years.
Ornament removed, the structure left visible, the purpose of the thing made legible in its shape. Sachlichkeit as a building.
German insurance and police reporting distinguish damage to things from injury to people as separate categories, named separately, counted separately. A traffic report states whether there was Sachschaden only.
The division between the matter and the person runs deep enough to structure how accidents are recorded.
To come to the matter. The German for getting to the point, and the metaphor is different from the English one.
A point is a place in an argument. Die Sache is the thing under discussion. English asks you to be concise. German asks you to arrive at the substance.
Don’t get personal. Said when a discussion has left the matter and started to be about the people in the room.
It is not a plea for politeness. In German usage it is a correction — you have stopped talking about the problem, and you need to go back.
German splits books into Belletristik and Sachbuch. Fine writing, and matter-book.
English calls the second category non-fiction — defined by what it is not. German names it for what it contains.
The German title for a caseworker or clerk translates literally as matter-worker. The person who works the matter.
Not an officer, not an associate, not a representative. The job is named after the thing being handled.
German legal reasoning separates the Sachverhalt — the state of the matter, what actually happened — from the rechtliche Würdigung, the legal assessment of it.
The facts are established first, as a distinct step, with their own section in the judgment. Only then does anyone argue about what they mean.
The structure of a German court decision is the structure of Sachlichkeit.
To the things themselves. Husserl’s demand, and the founding instruction of phenomenology: set aside theory, assumption and inherited interpretation, and attend to what is actually there.
The most abstract philosophical movement Germany produced began by insisting on the concrete.
In June 1925 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, opened an exhibition called Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus. The name stuck to an entire era.
Hartlaub described the artists as those who had retained or regained their fidelity to positive, tangible reality. Otto Dix put it more bluntly: they wanted to see things quite naked, clearly, almost without art.
It was a reaction against Expressionism — against the mystical, the subjective, the utopian. A culture that names an art movement after objectivity has a strong relationship with the idea.
Sache is the matter, the thing itself. Sachlich means pertaining to the matter and nothing else.
English has no clean equivalent. Objectivity suggests neutrality of the observer. Matter-of-fact is a description of manner. Sachlich is neither — it names a discipline: keeping to the substance and out of everything around it.
A German asking you to be sachlich is not asking you to be calm. They are asking you to talk about the problem.