Literal Font Nazis

I've heard the term "Font Nazi" applied to anyone who decries the use of Comic Sans or vehemently argues the superiority of Helvetica over Arial, but here's a true story about literal font Nazis.

Fraktur is a Gothic blackletter calligraphic hand developed in Germany, circa 1500. Modern forms are often mistakenly called "Old English" or similar names. (The Old English language predates blackletter, and was written in Insular script or Futhorc runes.)

Antiqua, by contrast, is a very different script developed slightly earlier in Italy. Antiqua fuses Roman capitals with some characteristics of Carolingian minuscules and is the direct ancestor of many fonts, such as Times New Roman, that are still common today.

Both Fraktur and Antiqua spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire, but over the centuries Antiqua grew more predominant, not least because it was easier to write and more legible than Fraktur. By the end of the 18th century, Fraktur was on the verge of extinction almost everywhere... except for Germany, where it was still going strong. And thus began the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute.

At first, Fraktur and Antiqua coexisted in peace. Fraktur was used for text in German, and Antiqua was used for text in Latin. At left is a document from 1768 showing the two side by side. This began to change in the early 19th century when Napoleon invaded Germany and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, and nationalists emerged who attempted to define a German national character. Partisans arose on both sides, and the debate raged through the 19th century and well into the 20th. Some argued that Fraktur was old-fashioned and out of date in a world in which most countries relied on Antiqua. Others retorted that Antiqua, being derived from Roman letterforms, was the obsolete one, and that Fraktur was natively and distinctively German. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the famous writer and politician, favored Antiqua despite the objections of his mother, while Otto von Bismarck was so dedicated to Fraktur that he refused to read books printed in Antiqua. In 1910 Adolf Reinecke published Die deutsche Buchstabenschrift (The German Alphabet), which went so far as to claim that Latin script caused eyestrain and nearsightedness, and ascribed almost magical properties to Fraktur.

 A vote was taken in the Reichstag on May 4, 1911, on a proposal to make Antiqua the national typeface. The debate was long and emotional, and the proposal was narrowly defeated by a vote of 85-82.

In 1934, Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler himself (I told you we'd be hearing about literal Nazis) denounced Fraktur in a speech before the Reichstag, published in Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party, on September 7 of that year:

"Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far..."

Finally, the debate was settled by fiat in 1941, in an edict signed by Martin Bormann, private secretary to Hitler. The edict banned Fraktur once and for all, on the grounds that it constituted "Schwabacher Judenlettern" (Jew-letters from Schwabach). Fraktur was to be phased out of use immediately in all Nazi territory, to be replaced by the "modern," "normal" Antiqua. In a grand feat of irony, the letterhead of that edict was printed in Fraktur.

After the Second World War and the overthrow of the Nazi government, Fraktur made a small resurgence, but was ultimately unable to stand up to the global Latin onslaught. Fraktur is no longer taught in schools, and now appears almost exclusively on beer labels, on pub signs, or in similar contexts in which it is meant to convey a rustic, old-fashioned attitude. Even then, it often contains mistakes made out of ignorance, such as a lack of ligatures or incorrect characters in place of similar-looking ones.

That concludes the story of the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute, but that wasn't the only time that heads of state have become involved in typography. Hangul, the alphabet in which the Korean language is written, was devised (some say singlehandedly) by Sejong the Great in 1443, out of concern that his country lacked a native writing system and that Chinese writing was both unsuited to the language and too difficult for many common people to learn. Hangul was such a success that to this day, South Korea has one of the highest proportional literacy rates in the world.

Even the British Isles have seen "executive meddling" of this sort. In 1571, the first Gaelic typeface was developed under orders from Elizabeth I, who commissioned a new catechism to convert Irish Roman Catholics to Anglicanism, and needed it to be legible by the masses (no pun intended). Over the years, that typeface evolved into decorative "Irish" fonts, which redraw Latin characters in the style of native Insular script, making a uniquely British style of type.

I hope you've learned something interesting; I certainly had a good time researching all of this. As discussion, can you think of any other periods in which typography has played a major political or cultural role?