Here's an interesting blog post by Michael Tomasky that appeared in The Guardian which comments on, among other things, the Democratic proclivity towards san-serif typefaces and the Republican fondness for serifs. He too comments on the political history of typography in Germany, and though he doesn't touch upon the great Fraktur debate specifically, he does make mention that under Hitler's regime modern san-serifs like Futura were dismissed as being "Jewish inventions."
After reading this, I saw the tendency for san-serif type to be linked to progressiveness... the mortal enemy of all things fascist. Curiosity for the veracity of this theory led me to an excellent article by another Nathan (Francis, not Rosen) appearing on the InstantShift web development site. Here, Francis discusses how certain typographic milestones have contributed to various political events and cultural identities. He talks about Johnston Sans, the typeface developed for the London Underground in 1913 by Edward Johnston:
On the eve of the Great War in Europe, Germans were making great design innovations. British designers and politicians became concerned that elements of the new German style would infiltrate their own graphic arts in a form of subtle cultural invasion. Johnston's block typeface was a reaction against that, with it's clean geometric forms drawn directly from the stone-cut Roman Letters of Trajan's Column, itself a symbol of imperialist strength and fortitude.
Francis continues by discussing Paul Renner, the typographer, artist, and author who developed Futura. He was exiled from his own country during the Third Reich, a regime responsible for eradicating cultural innovation of every and all kinds. In Type 1 here at UB, I made a poster devoted to him, in part because I found his proto-Futura letterforms so fascinating:
Renner was close friends with fellow typographer, Jan Tschichold, who wrote The New Typography in 1928. Together, they maintained the need for a clear, unadorned san-serif for improved legibility, one modeled after Russian Constructivism. Unfortuately, this allusion to their communist neighbors to the east made Renner and Tschichold easy targets for the German nationalists, who quickly labeled them Bolshevists. In what Francis describes as a "an act of moral courage that staggers belief," Renner expressed his displeasure at Nazi racism and prejudice by publishing the booklet "Kultur-Bolschewismus?" ("Cultural Bolshevism?"). Soon after, Tschichold and his wife were detained in a concentration camp (luckily both were soon released and fled to Switzerland), and Renner was removed from his teaching post and placed in internal exile. Thankfully, Renner continued living and working until his death in 1956, and Futura long outlasted the Fascist regime and the war.
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