Drawing on a corpus study using German and Austrian parliamentary protocols, this paper shows that the originally temporal connector nachdem `after' may carry causal meaning in southern German standard varieties. In these varieties, nachdem clauses may occur with individual level predicates, cases which, I will argue, provide unambiguously causal contexts since a temporal succession of events is excluded with individual level predicates. While nachdem displays polysemy comparable to English since in southern German standard varieties, it is a temporal marker in central and northern German varieties and a causal link may arise only due to a conversational implicature. The observed polysemy coincides with a higher token frequency of nachdem as well as a higher incidence of present tense use in the nachdem clause in the respective southern German varieties. Remarkably, causal nachdem clauses show a clear tendency to be fronted to the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to be post-posed, both cross-linguistically and in German, which may be explained in terms of information structure and discourse-organizing functions.