Peter Dörfell lives in Dresden Germany where he works in elder care, visiting clients at their homes, and to do that, he usually takes the bus. But one morning last September, he noticed something unusual as he boarded. “When I got on the bus, I see that the bus driver had put up a sign inside of the bus that said in German, ‘Diesen Bus Steuert ein Deutscher Fahrer,’ which means ‘this bus is driven by a German driver.’” This was not the kind of message Peter was used to seeing on his daily commute, but to Peter… the meaning of the message was pretty clear.
“The implication to me was […] I am one of the good ones and not, a ‘foreigner.’” But what really drove the message of this sign home, was not just the words, but the typeface it was printed in. A typeface from a family of German typefaces once used throughout Germany which are known collectively as Fraktur which in English goes by a different name: blackletter. Blackletter is the type of old-timey Gothic typeface that you often see used for the bold front titles of newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post, or on the T‑shirts of Heavy Metal bands. But for many people, especially in Europe, blackletter is most closely associated with one thing: it’s the “Nazi Font“.
𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗
If you have ever caught even one minute of the History Channel… or really any documentary about World War II, you have seen this type. You’ve seen it on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi roadwork signs. Today in Germany, blackletter typefaces are frequently used by Neo-Nazi groups and for many Germans, they bring to mind the dark times of the country’s fascist past.
Florian Hardwig is a graphic designer and the editor of a website called Fonts in Use and he says that in Germany, any blackletter typeface is used to signal German nationalism. Using blackletter is a statement and sends a signal of emphasizing the “Germanness.” Today, depending on one’s perspective, blackletter can either represent German culture’s rich and proud heritage or alternatively, symbolize everything that is wrong with it. But to understand how people’s feelings about a simple typeface got to this point, we need to go back to the moment of its birth.
𝕺𝖓𝖊 𝕿𝖞𝖕𝖊𝖋𝖆𝖈𝖊 𝖙𝖔 𝕽𝖚𝖑𝖊 𝕿𝖍𝖊𝖒 𝕬𝖑𝖑
Once upon a time in that bygone era of knights and castles and feather quills, blackletter was used all across Europe. Blackletter may seem incredibly ornate and definitely does not seem like a conventional style of writing, but back in the Middle Ages, blackletter was actually considered practical. Dan Reynolds is an American type designer and historian who has been living in Germany for the last two decades, and he says today we’re used to letterforms with perfectly rounded curves: think of our O’s, U’s, P’s, and C’s. But while these shapes look easy enough to draw, if you’re using a quill to draw out thousands of them, page after page, it becomes difficult.
Back then, just as now, readers valued standardization in a text. Every letter, even the rounded ones, had to look exactly the same. It was hard for a monk copying out a text to consistently draw perfect circles over and over again, and if you were a scribe it was a lot easier to produce all those Os and Us and Cs out of a series of short straight lines. The technique of using straight lines instead of curves gave the letters a fragmented appearance. Which is actually how Germany’s most common form of blackletter would get its name: Fraktur.
Blackletter was first developed in France in the 12th Century, but within a few hundred years it had become standard throughout Europe. So much so that it wasn’t really a type choice, it was just what words looked like. Susan Reed is head of Germanic Studies at the British Library, and she says that blackletter became so ingrained in the culture that even after it stopped being needed, people kept using it. As with so many big leaps in technology, the printing press started off by borrowing heavily on the design conventions that came before it, even though the new operating principles made those conventions unnecessary.
