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. 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. Once upon a time in that bygone era of knights and castles and feather quills, blackletter was used all across Europe. 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. 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. 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.įlorian 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. You’ve seen it on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi roadwork signs. 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. But for many people, especially in Europe, blackletter is most closely associated with one thing: it’s the “Nazi Font.” 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. 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. “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. “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. But one morning last September, he noticed something unusual as he boarded. 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.
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