Why did Germany stop using the Gothic script halfway through WWII?

by DonCaliente

According to the wiki it is because Bormann thought that it was discovered the script was designed by Jews. I can't help but think that there are other reasons though.

Joe64x

Scripts are a little detached from my niche, but to offer a response:

The German script debate is mirrored by the War of the Romantics, the moniker given to the debate among the German intellectuals regarding Germany's cultural/ideological identity. There were two camps which were broadly labelled conservative and progressive.

There was a lot of this going on in German culture affecting everything from the Brothers Grimm to Wagner. One side advocated enshrining the mysticism associated with German history while the other wanted to modernise. This reflects the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute. The "ideological connotations" Wikipedia mentions are the aforementioned ones.

Fraktur, on the Gothic side, represented the mystic German history I glossed over, while Antiqua (despite its name) was considered the more modern alphabet. Bormann and others in power were modernists and saw Antiqua as the way forward in German supremacy. It wouldn't surprise me if Blackletter typefaces were called Jewish to speed this along.

Now, while this may be the "theory" behind the shift, in practice it's probable that Blackletter wouldn't have held up happily to the pressures of European support of Antiqua/Latin typefaces anyway, considering Germany's place in Europe.

Celebreth

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Tychonaut

Ach. I am on the road now so I don't have my references with me.

But as I recall it was due to eligibility issues. The old gothic and fraktur fonts which were being used were difficult to read for those that had not grown up with them (ie .. the people in the occupied territories.)

Especially .. s, f, z, l, t, j .. are tricky and can easily be mistaken for one another. And you also have to add confusion from slavic names like "Sojczynski" and you can imagine how a lot of confusion would come up as things go back and forth between the occupiers and the occupied.

When it concerns military orders, or police lists of people to be arrested, etc .. you don't want to have people bickering over misread names, addresses, and other details.

So the story was concocted that the old fonts had Jewish "taint", and a more eligible font was introduced. Because of course, the Gothic/Fraktur fonts, being traditionally German and therefore superior, couldn't just be called "hard to read and problematic".

yoshiK

From a quick survey of the online sources from the German Wikipedia article, hence all links are in German except if noted otherwise.

The Antiqua-Fraktur dispute dates back to the beginning of the 19th century and it appears that usually the nationalists preferred Fraktur. But the front lines in the dispute were not settled enough to prevent the use by left wing groups during the Weimar republic. ( Social democratic propaganda poster ) On the right Hitler apparently disliked Fraktur. In 1934 he said in a address to the Reichstag (translation English Wikipedia)

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 ...

But this did not lead to a coherent policy, in 1939 high-schools were still ordered to teach both "German and Latin script," that is Fraktur and Antiqua. Additionally, on 7/30/1937 the Propaganda ministry forbade Jewish publishers to use Fraktur. Which was a demand of the Deutsche Studentenschaft ( German student union) from 1933.

An interesting detail is, that the NSDAP party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter was set in Bernhard-Fraktur, a font by the Jewish designer Lucian Bernhard, until after the banning of Fraktur. The publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter was at the meeting referenced in the Normalschrifterlass. And it is a temptation to speculate, if these two are related.

Friedrich Beck notes in his 2006 essay on the topic (German, pdf), that the banning of Fraktur was puzzling especially for Germans abroad, and he sees it as a expression of dictatorial power. That is, it is simply a matter of Hitlers personal preference, rather than some deep reason.

CribbageLeft

Fun fact: the memo that Bormann released to mandate the changeover to modern script was printed with the Nazi party logo in Fraktur (Gothic) script.