German is a language with a relatively free word order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena. In the following paper, I deal with some tough cases of German word order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are PP complements of nouns and adjec?tives, which can appear separated from their heads in the German Mittelfeld, and stranded prepositions. The similarity to fronting of these elements is used to explain these phenomena by a generalized version of the head-filler schema used in the standard HPSG framework.