The Fonts That Broke Germany
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Psychology Of Fonts: 99designs.com/blog/tips/font-...
The Antiqua-Fraktur Dispute: thedabbler.co.uk/2014/09/the-a...
Antiqua/Fraktur: holliross.wordpress.com/2012/...
German Typefaces: penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/...
Fraktur & Its Legacy: www.typeroom.eu/a-nazi-font-b...
History Of Fraktur: www.waldenfont.com/HistoryofF...
History Of Antiqua: luc.devroye.org/fonts-67112.html
The Printing Press & The Reformation: www.worldhistory.org/article/...
Germany’s Fonts: allaboutberlin.com/guides/ger...
Drop your favourite font in the comments!
calibri
The font of knowledge.
Palemonas, the Lithuanian font regarding the legend about our nations 'Roman' origin, created duting the Renaissance period
Merriweather (which I was surprised to see in the video)
That depends, but I'm very fond of Garamond typefaces (there are many). Often paired up with Univers (a sans-serif family).
So this is why in the Asterix comics, the Germanian tribes are depicted speaking in a Blackletter typeface? Brilliant!
And let's not forget: Even though these were both printed using metal type, only _one_ of them is truly _Metal._
𝖙𝖗𝖚𝖊 𝖋𝖗
best comment
And all Hip-Hop from the 1990’s through the late 2000’s.
1:58 - 2:05 two takes on saying “who by the late 15th century when this font came into being”
I thought my brain glitched when I heard that
I thought I was having a stroke there for a moment then I rewound like five seconds and saw that I wasn’t…
I actually thought I accidentally pressed the left arrow key on my computer lol, so I looked at it again and was like: "ohhhh"
Fraktur doesn't come from the fact that the LETTERS aren't joined up. It's because the letters are made with strokes so they look "broken" or "fractured" (gebrochene Schrift), which is where "Fraktur" comes from. You took the pen/quill and made the letters using strokes/edges, not round circles and loops. It's basically a way of writing and it had its own handwriting to go with it (Kurrentschrift). It had ligatures, long and round S and different rules for usage (ex. a word couldn't end with ss - it had to be ß). It's sad that broken script is linked with the 3rd Reich when in fact it existed for centuries before that.
Thanks, the mistake annoyed by mildly
So many things share the fait of being linked to the Ns besides existing before.
I wonder how the other 'Gothic' fonts got their names, like Bastard & Schwabacher
@@mm552 Wikipedia has all that information
@@passatboi Yeah, that makes sense. Not sure why I didn't think of that 😅
Fraktur and its predecessor, Schwabacher, are the reason for German nouns being capitalized. Because Blackletter typefaces have very similar looking and thus not easily distinguishable lower case characters, typesetters were generously using upper case letters to improve readability. With time, this turned into a rule of thumb in typesetting: Use upper case letters for all nouns, and you get a readable page.
If you look at woodcut book pages from the 15th century, you can already see the increased use of capitalization, e.g. the prints of Hans Sachs or the earliest Doktor Faustus editions.
I work for a German institute library despite my shaky grasp of the language because I'm the only one who can read Fraktur and old German Cursive, so any book before 1940 goes to me.
that's pretty neat, so you just read aloud and they transliterate it into modern German orthography
how different is German cursive from English?
Even old magazines were printed in Fraktur.. I've got some pre-WW1 magazines from the Bremen area and WOW. I can read it too.
@@nxtvim2521 Oh boy. Look up "Sütterlin" handwriting examples, you will have a hard time reading it. Coincidentally I had to read a Sütterlin sentence this week and this one sentence took me 5 minutes, despite having some experience with it...
@@nxtvim2521Nowadays not so much, but there were Kurrent and Sütterlin which were essentially old cursive.
@@aramisortsbottcher8201The fun fact is that Sütterlin was created in the early 20th century to replace the "old-fashioned" ways of writing cursive they had before then. There's Kurrent which is even harder to read
As a German, reading an old book in Fraktur (or any other old »broken« typeface) is pretty easy for me. But reading old German Cursive is a completely different challenge.
The German school fonts of Sütterlin or Koch (Offenbacher) are pretty easy to read, but old Kurrent writing is nearly unreadable for me.
Interesting that Fraktur (emphasis on the last syllable, BTW) has Protestant origins - the only place I see it nowadays outside of museums, period dramas and historical documentaries is... traditional beer festivals in deepest rural - and Catholic - Bavaria!
Definitely not _origins._ Protestants might have made it fashionable, but the stylistic elements that it originates from are centuries older than Luther's blogpost.
It might be stretching it a bit, but I'd be sorely tempted to argue that the origins of Fraktur were in the Carolingian Minuscule, a sort of scribal standard that arose and spread in the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, founded 800 CE. That standard, stylised in a particular direction, became a bunch of Blackletter hands, including the ones that we nowadays call Fraktur. Gutenberg then happened to invent a scribe-fast machine, which popularised his personal cultural preference, which happened to be a kind of Fraktur, and for a while, this variety spread much more rapidly than its competitors.
Also, Rammstein.
Also, biker jackets.
You obviously don't listen to a lot of Heavy Metal music! Or '80's Heavy Metal, anyway, so as to capture that kinda _Teutonic_ look! Nowadays most HM bands seem to favour logos that look like they were scratched onto a schoolroom desk. Kinda hard to incorporate goats heads and pentagrams into those "Ölde World~ey" Fraktur/Old English/Gothic style typefaces!
Oh and then there must be a gajillion newspaper mastheads... (What's a 'newspaper', Daddy?)
He said emperor Maximilian created it. Definitely not a Protestant.
Also, highest abstract algebra books, more precisely Lie algebras
Your decision to use “font” instead of typeface, is very topical to your channel. Y’know, with the whole colloquialism.
Very true,
Most people aren't some sort designer though.
Meanwhile, Polish has both "czcionka" (native Polish word) and "font" (obviously borrowed from English) which Polish people argue which word is correct as colloquially are interchangeable but according to the Polish Language Council; "czcionka" refers to traditional printing presses while "font" refers to modern digital computers and printers.
i've noticed that most of the research in his videos is quite shallow. he seldom makes a real effort to pronounce words from other languages correctly or source audio clips with the correct pronunciation. with that being said, i enjoy his videos and the fun topics, taking the commentary with a grain of salt.
@@jbw416 He already acknowledges that they aren’t correct, and to take them with a grain of salt. He literally says this in a decent amount of videos.
@@NBrixH that's the laziest solution to putting the wrong information in his videos
Fraktuura (fraktur) was used in Finland too, and it was used long after many other countries stopped using it. Depending on which places to compare, Finland used Fraktuura 50-100 years longer than others just because people did not know, how to read the latin script. Fraktuura was used in Finland as late as the 1950's. I can read fraktuura, but much slower than latin script.
Was Finnish written with this typeface or did Swedish or something dominate scripts?
@@deutschermichel5807 both Swedish and Finnish were written with fraktur, but the the usage of it stopped much sooner than with Finnish. Even some Finnish news articles were written with fraktur on the papers. 1900-1950's many news papers had some parts written with fraktur, and some with the latin script. I haven't read Swedish in that style because Finnish is my native language.
@@Niko_P_Iskanius does it look ”good” or suitable in your eyes to write Finnish with blackletters?
@@deutschermichel5807 yes it does look nice. There is some candy packets that use fraktur. You can google Sisu candy and see for yourself
It is really not weird at all that H preferred Antiqua since he was really from Austria and raised as a Roman-Catholic.
So he wouldn't have had any strong feelings for Fraktur, that was more linked to Protestant Germany.
Fraktur was used by Catholics and Protestants likewise.
Yes, I donʼt get where Name Explain got this Catholic-Protestant dichotomy in regards to typeface from. Fraktur was used by Catholics, too@@ulrichhartmann4585
@@ulrichhartmann4585 Perhaps, but I thought that this video said that the typefaces were associated with different denominations.
@@Furienna... yes because Name Explain lied bruh. I am convinced that he didnʼt want to lie, tho
You can say Hitler you know
German here, complaining about your pronunciation: The U ind Fraktur is long, more like "frucktour".
When I am shopping for old books, I enjoy the fact that You can distinguish the old ones from the really old ones just by their fonts.
The U is short
@@aquilla2.087 Nope
@@aquilla2.087 Nein! Definitiv langes U
Forget German, this guy has trouble pronouncing words from his own language. Go watch his video about the etymology of Croatia (where I'm from btw) to see what I mean. I love the vids, though, but things like this make them sound silly despite all the hard work and thorough research. Why is it so hard to research how things are pronounced as well?
I recall seeing a repair manual for BMW motorcycles, dating I think from the 1930s, printed in Fraktur. Alongside detailed illustrations of carburettors etc, it looked really weird - like a medieval manuscript about installing washing machines.
1:58 scratch take left in
Whereas in the US, we have the Comic Sans MS vs Calligraffiti Conflict.
Comic Sans actually looks better than Calligraffiti because it's at least readable
th-cam.com/video/GUCcObwIsOs/w-d-xo.html
@@Tailikku1 HERETIC!!!! 😜
If someone went back in time and showed them Comic Sans we could probably have a German Reich (and possibly WWI) a hundred years ahead of time.
I as a german happen to be able to read Fraktur (in print, at least), bcs our family still has two ancient cook books, one from 1937 and one from 1886. Quite a number (not all) of these recipes we still use today.
I also can read Fraktur quite well without having such a book. My grandmother used to writed the lowercase z in Sütterlin, another typeface. With this I learned (a bit) about the moonphases because the "z" in Sütterlin from "zunehmen" looked like a crescent moon.
@@HalfEye79 Ah yes, the old german "A" with the big arc on the left like the "Abnehmende Mond/waning moon" and the old german "Z" with its big arc on the right like the "Zunehmende Mond/waxing moon".
I learned that from my granny as well :)
I've got an old Lessing collection from the 1910s, never read through it but it trained my on the script, together with two Grimm's fairy tales from the same period.
My understanding of H's promotion of "Latin" typefaces was that he wanted Germany to be taken seriously on the world stage, and he didn't think that would be possible if no one else could read their writing. Pretty valid argument, I think.
(I had to learn to read Fraktur for my master's work, but I admit I haven't read into its history in a while.)
I did my MA on early 20th century German history and had to work with index cards typed by librarians who couldn't read Fraktur. I remember one index card book title that included the words "Unferes Fozialen Brogramms". 😅
@@donatist59 Lol, I think my favorite in Fraktur was the "tz" at the end of words that could look like a tiny capital B.
2:30 and to illustrate how Fraktur doesn't use ligatures, the example uses a ligature.
Frakture is very heavy in ligatures. ß derives from two letter forms very common in Fraktur, but not in Antiqua (ſ and ʒ)
Two things to point out:
1) Some of these fonts were optimized to save space when writing a book. My favorite Fraktur font is a good example of being both aesthetically pleasing and legible even when compact: kingthings calligraphica. It's a bit of a modern blend making it easier to read for us today, but it really keeps the overall aesthetics...
2) During the time of the dispute, handwriting changed as well. I can't read the handwriting of my grandparents! Meanwhile, I can read Fraktur fairly well. Speaking of the latter, Umlaute, scharfes S, etc. play a role as well in the transition. Sadly, I can't show them or their development in this comment.
PS: The Antiqua-script you found is my favorite of the ones you used.
This is a test to see if I can type an umlaut using its defined MacOS keystroke Cmd-u Nope, YT rejects it.
Command U is undo. I think you're looking for option U which only works on certain keyboard layouts. On others you press option U then either the letter you want umlauted or space if you just want a naked umlaut.
In Linux it's easy enough even on a US keyboard layout, if you have a Compose key set: äöüßſ
There were many German language newspapers in the US before WWI. They used fraktur and printed on heavy, shiny paper, quite different than their English language papers from the same city.
"I dont read German books in Latin letters" surely if I can see the irony of that statement, Bismarck one of the greatest statesmen of all time could as well right?
Please make a video about vocal fry! It is painfully obvious to me that after almost every every word that ends in a vocalized consonant or a vowel, you intrude a creaky schwa. I.e. too-uh, Germany-uh, language-uh; it even goes creaky on words that end in nasalized consonants. Protestantism-h. It would be interesting to see possible causes of this
Exactly, so weird and annoying
You should do a video on Kurrent or Sütterlin handwriting used in Germany. That makes Fraktur look easy to read.
I honestly donʼt think he should. I appreciate his work on yt but he (consciously) makes so many oversimplifications that important details get brushed over. For example Fraktur is not nor was it ever a particularly protestant typeface
@@deutschermichel5807 I have many Lutheran books in Fraktur, so…. 🤪 Just kidding.
What I found a little annoying was the suggestion that Fraktur can be difficult to read. I am an American, whose native language is English. Granted, I have worked with Fraktur for nearly 30 years, and have many books printed in it. Yet my German sister-in-law cannot read it easily, if at all. Put anything in Kurrent or Sütterlin in front of her, and she channels Satan in German basically telling me no sane person would have a clue to what those scribbles are. Which thinking of it, I think I think I should start writing her letters in Sütterlin for instructions on family events. But I digress.
On a side note, I personally do like Fraktur. Not because some of the German reasons it dominated for so long, but rather for its artistic presentation, as well as its uniqueness in modernity. Let me tell you, you haven’t read the Bible until you read it in its original Fraktur print. (Sorry, a poor joke based on a Star Trek reference.)
th-cam.com/video/HsCVuO1yeJc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=KhcbapqI9UgIwo5v
@@stephenkneller6435 lol
When I mentioned to my Latin teacher that I read a hundred years old Lutheran Bible printed in Fraktur, she told me to just go read the Latin Vulgate already 😂
It's probably just a matter of exposure. I find Fraktur (and other kinds of blackletter) easy to read (in my head, their letterforms' skeletons are close enough to modern popular Latin script letterforms to recognise at glance; Schwabacher generally being closer to what I'm used to than High Fraktur), I can also read Sütterlin easily, sometimes with a bit of effort, but I often really can't make heads or tails out of Kurrent. And that's probably because my local library used to have a couple of old books typeset in Fraktur or Schwabacher, Sütterlin is reasonably close to the modern 'European cursive' hand that I learnt as a child, and my exposure to Kurrent has been brief enough for my brain not to learn to recognise its patterns just yet.
=> If you need to read (or write) any of these, it's probably just a matter of some practice, not a significant inherent complexity.
Wait until you see Marx's handwriting. A doctor saw it and gave up trying to read it.
It appears that you've recently gotten to pronounce an intrusive vowel at the end of words. Your "being" now sounds as "being-uh", "language" as "language-uh". I don't recall hearing that quirk in your previous videos, at least from a couple years ago
That’s been happening for at least six months or so. Maybe more. I agree that it is a bit of an annoying quirk.
Is a UK thing? There was a contestant (Dana) on Great British Bake-off last season who spoke in the exact same way…
Very off-putting.
Not to mention the vocal fry. I always feel people who speak like that are trying to prove something.
In Germany, the term Antiqua is often used to describe all Roman typefaces like Times Roman or Century Expanded. Also, it's easier to spell the German language with the Fraktur style of typefaces because they still have the "long s", but, of course, it's perfectly possible to have a long s in a Roman typeface as well.
> "but, of course, it's perfectly possible to have a long s in a Roman typeface as well."
Indeed, and the moſt common fonts ſtill have it, juſt in caſe.
Why do you need ſ to spell German? The letter is totally redundant. It's just at the beginning or within a word (yes it's slightly more complicated, and that's precisely the reason it was abolished. It's complex and unnecessary)
One big miss for me in this video is that the only words in either font you showed were the font names themselves. Seeing the same paragraph in each font would have been useful in comparing them.
Antiqua is not at all like handwriting. The upper case fonts were designed to be chiselled in stone. Minuskel was a nod to writing with a quill, but still deduced from the chiselled letters.
Fraktur OTOH took its design from the practicalities of writing with a broad cut quill. It also was designed to give an evenly filled look on the page. It stems from the practice of writing books by hand.
A while ago at university I had to work with a school book for Latin from the 50s. Of course the German parts were in Fraktur, the Latin words and texts were in Latin font and it had some sprinkles of Ancient Greek - of course in Greek letters.
Even many Germans struggled to read the Fraktura-parts, but for some students from East Asia or other European Countries it was very hard.
Tirritate them with Katakana Fraktur. 😸
I love texts that have German written in Fraktur, Latin written in Antiqua, Greek written in Greek letters. I have like four Latin school books like this at home
I never understood how people can have issues with reading Fraktur. Like every letter looks like its supposed to except the lowercase x.
@@OneAngryVelociraptor The lowercase f and s can sometimes look alike.
I wonder what the connection between this Latin-German dispute and the invention of the Helvetica (the very name means Swiss) font which was adopted worldwide as clean, modern and legible in the 1960s.
Heck, we already had a few modernist sans-serif fonts even before WW2. Futura was designed in Germany in 1927, for example -- inspired by a lot of the same ideals that were driving Bauhaus designs (in architecture and other things) at the same time.
How come your perculiar pronunciation of the end of words, e. g. language-eh, Germany-eh, word-eh, Napoleon-eh, identity-eh?
OMG, I was about to leave the same comment. So curious about his peculiar accent.
Name Explain: “the fonts were split between Catholicism and Protestantism”
Also Name Explain: * shows a Catholic text written in Gothic blackletters *
It's weird to constantly be told, how Germany is a protestant country, while I'm here in southern Germany (not bavaria), where everybody is catholic. It's not only the south, the west is predominantly catholic too. Germany is way less protestant, than a lot of people (including some northern/eastern germans) think and way more catholic.
But we are still more...
Germans tend to imagine they invented Protestantism (it was actually the Czechs). A bit like Lager (also a Czech invention).
@@chrisoneill3999 wasn't the Protestant shift mainly based around Martin Luther? As far as I know he was German.
@@chrisoneill3999so we can blame protestantism on the Czech 🤫
@@chrisoneill3999 No, protestantism was invented by the Hugenots. Or is Christianity perhaps a protestantism of judaism? Seriously, arguments like these are entirely pointless. Martin Luther invented Lutheranism, I think we can say that for sure, but claims like "we invented beer" or "we invented not liking the pope" are nonsensical, because there have always been people (christians) not liking the pope and organizing around that ever since the pope, just like people have basically always made alcohol out of grains, ever since grains. Something like Lager beer, or Protestantism didn't come out of nowhere, so there can't be a definite, single inventor of it. Even for something like the light bulb or the telephone, seemingly every country on earth has "their guy", who is supposedly the inventor of it. Because there actually isn't "the one" inventor, but a series of step by step innovations around the technology, that included lots of people from lots of nations, without just "the one" inventor being part of that. A more recent example is the internet, same story.
It is still used for many street names in Germany.
It is dumb that the use of certain words demonetizes a channel, there are reasons why using them is acceptable and that should be considered - but we don’t want to use resources to justify content.
Also, I don’t like any typeface that looks like either one of these, I find them much more difficult to read than is necessary. I am glad that modern typefaces, while being less flashy, are very legible when viewed from large distances.
I enjoy reading Fraktur books, feels artistic.
Sadly in Antiqua/modern fonts ſ isn’t commonly used, leading to some problems in distinguishing between certain words in German. Common examples are ‚Wachs-tube‘ and ‚Wach-stube‘, ‚Krei-schen‘ and ‚Kreis-chen‘ and ‚Ver-sen-dung‘ and ‚Vers-en-dung‘ that are all written the same way, but have different pronunciations and unrelated meanings.
Faktur is a category of fonts. Schwabacher is one of them - but not the predecessor of all of them.
Also the catholics used Fraktur, but all users of it used antiqua fonts for foreign words.
This „preserving the readability of older books“ didn’t hold back from switching to fraktura. It’s quite easy to read both types and it was a common ability for centuries.
The dispute in praxis effected the public not before the late 19th or early 20th century.
I used to set printing type with actual pieces of printing type. The style of the type face was called a font. Then things changed when I started electronic typesetting. Instead of individual pieces of type, copy was set electronically. Copy was printed out photographically and then pasted down on cardboard boards. While still referring to the style of the lettering as fonts, the term typeface be came more commom.
I always loved Fraktur, and even learned reading it in my teens. And now you're telling me it's associated with Bismarck? What a shame.
It really isnʼt. Bismarck took the nationalist German side of the dispute. But saying Antiqua was Latin and Catholic while Fraktur was German and Protestant is simply a lie
What do you have against Bismarck?
@@OneAngryVelociraptor
Mainly that he made German unification impossible for the foreseeable future, and that he set up a way too intricate system that nobody could have maintained for long.
yooo did you write the Antiqua/Fraktur/Shwabacher fonts yourself?? excellent work! clean calligraphy
Im curious why your other video got demonitized. Seems youtube preys only on small channels.
The AI that YT uses cannot distinguish for what purpose this designation is used. Whether it is an argument for or against, or, as in this case, a historical fact. And size advertising partners, for example, don't want their advertising to be shown in front of, say, a Nazi channel.
The ceator can then have his videos checked and re-activated by YT, but this takes several days and then most of the clicks are through and thus the option to earn money with the video.
I watched this during my flight to Antigua; I found it to be a font of knowledge that helped mend my fractured understanding of the subject.
My Grandmother's Swedish language prayer book from the late 19th century was printed in Fraktur.
I didnt knew that before, thanks for making the video. The more you know 🌠
Great video. I'm studying typography as part of a graphic design course. In particular blackletter typefaces and their origins, but also Swiss-Style and up to modern day. Interesting that Bismark's picture has a very modern sans serif font in the sign behind him. Both these fronts were very old by the time it was taken.
In math, some of us like to use Fraktur to notate the real and imaginary parts of a complex number.
This isn't ubiquitous, you'll see Re(z), Im(z) with the same fonts, but I personally like to write Re and Im in fraktur
I haven't seen them used that way, but I've seen R and C set in Fraktur to represent the sets of real and complex numbers, respectively.
These are the symbols I got thought to use for sets,
ℝ (Unicode: U+211D) set of real numbers
ⅈ (U+2148) set of imaginary numbers
ℂ (U+2102) set of complex numbers
ℕ (U+2115) set of natural numbers
ℚ (U+211A) set of rational numbers
ℤ (U+2124) set of integers
There are also , ℍ and ℙ, in the letterlike block and ⅅ, ⅆ, ⅇ and ⅉ in the double struck italic math block but I'm insure what sets those were, if any at all. It's been a while
Great video!
Fun Fact: After Fraktur was banned, because Antiqua was starting to be seen as old-fashioned anyway and sans-serif fonts were starting to become popular, one particular font grew in popularity in Germany: Futura. It sorta signified a transition to a more modern, "futuristic" Germany, afaik...
As a former graphic artist/typography guy, I LOVED this video. So darned interesting!
My faves are Baskerville and maybe Garamond. Or Palatino. I also like Century for some things
The Pronounciation of Fraktur, as Flaktur is really interesting
The way Germans felt about this font reminds me of how Americans feel about the metric system.
Does anyone know more about H's preference for Antiqua? Where did it come from?Because Austrian newspapers seemingly still largely used Fraktur in both 1914 and 1930, but NOT in 1945. Which means they stopped using it because of H and not the other way around.
I heard that it was because it is easier to read than fraktur to foreigners.
From a German perspective Fraktur was easier to read, because it had certain constructs that helped with grouping the letters correctly, particular in compound words, which is why it was simply the standard typeface for things like newspapers back then. (There is a similar reason why newspapers and books still consistently employ typefaces with serifs up to this day).
Hitler generally favored geometry based eastatics, which is very evident when you look into the building projects commisioned. As such he personally prefered Aniqua over Fraktur. However he was faced with the issue that in a political context, Aniqua fonts, in particular the relativly new sans-serif, where more associated with the political left and many of his associates and party members prefered Fraktur, in particular the "sans-serif Fraktur" styles that became popular a few years before the Nazi-takeover. For this reason he sidesteped the issue until 1944 when the "normal font decree" was issued. In this decree Fraktur fronts where labled as "Jewish" (a bullshit excuse to not having to give a meaningfull reason.) and where to be phased out in both goverment use and eductation.
After the war, the allied occupation forces had little love for Fraktur because they themselves found it difficult to read and as such also promoted antiqua. Politically all forces wanted to associate more with the pre-war left and thus used antiqua. Given that sans-serif Fraktur fonts where also very associated with the Nazi era, they stopped being used in advertisment and such. It was this combination of factors that effectivly killed Fraktur.
2 main reasons.
1. He liked being wrong.
2. Hes austrian (which may be connected to 1.)
It's worth noting that the Romans didn't have minuscule letters. So the part of Antiqua you see the most is actually from the Carolingian period. Which would make them pretty dark-aged and German.
I find it interesting that despite Germany's attitude to it, Austria still frequently uses Fraktur on shop signs or street signs.
I wish we still used it in germany. It looks pretty, has a lot of history and the french cant read it. Its literally the perfect typeface.
You need to do Railway Alphabet and Transport for your next typeface/font examination.
This is quite fascinating because not only does it discuss typography, but also history and identify
I remember there being a scandle a while back about a bus in Germany that had some nationalist and exclusionary statement in the window written in blackletter and was taken as a sort of hostile message to visible minorities who might get on the bus. I forget the key details of what it said exactly, but a major part of the horrified public reaction hinged not only on the words themselves, but on the kind of callback to German identity that using the font evoked. I do remember clearly that here ANY form of blackletter was seen as a facist dog whistle - not just fraktur or antiqua. It seems that the use of blackletter fonts in Germany, outside contexts where there is some other contextual explanation is still associated with callback to past German facism.
Sounds like the mainstream should conquer back blackletters typefaces! ✊
Germany is paranoid about nazism, also when it makes no sense
@deutschermichel5807 true
There are a few typefaces that are favorites; News Gothic, GE Inspira, Bahnschrift, and Highway Gothic. Fonts convey emotions so it's hard to choose just one.
2:02 editing mistake LMAO
I thought I was having a stroke for a sec
@@bezzquiko was just about to say this!
If you're keen on doing more videos about fonts/typefaces, Gaelic type might be another good one
I spent a year in Germany and whenever I tried to read an inscription on an old statue or plaque I literally couldn't cause the font made reading a foreign language nearly impossible
As a German I respectfully donʼt get how anyone canʼt read it. I mean, just read lol. I see how the fancy fractured (broken) nature of the letters might confuse the eyes of the reader but is it so hard to focus on the lettersʼ core form. Every letter of Fraktur (except maybe x, y but they are pretty much non-existant in German) looks basically like the Antiqua version but a little fancier
@@deutschermichel5807We germans cant have problems with it because we know the words and you only need to recognize like every 3rd letter of a word to read a language you speak fluently. The thing is foreigners arent as familiar with the words so they actually need to read the individual letters to figure out whats written there.
I taught myself Fraktur and old German cursive when I took German in college in the 1960s. My best friend, from Germany, couldn't read old German cursive and had me translate postcards and letters belonging to his ancestors into current cursive.
What a fascinating story... i learned something today!
If you haven’t already been to Germany I would highly encourage you not to miss the experience of a lifetime and I am not exaggerating either. I travelled to koln for a contract in the Fordwerke factory for a year or so and my dad had already worked over there in the 1980s but still nothing made me ready for the experience, the people, culture etc everything.🎚️
Both these typefaces seem like they would be at home with pen and ink *calligraphy* before the invention of printing. The letters have wide and narrow bits depending on the orientation of the nib. My heart goes out to the countless generations of school children who spent many a boring hour having to copy text in these typefaces from blackboard to exercise book.
We must acknowledge the inconsistency here. If they truly wanted to use a German writing style and script, then neither Fractur nor Antiqua would fulfill that requirement, and they are both still using the Roman-originated Latin script and alphabet. If they truly wanted to use something of German origin, they would use Germanic Runes, which like Latin was originally adapted from Greek letters, but is a script unique to the Germanic languages, and was only phased out and replaced by Latin letters (regardless of "font") by Christians/Catholics in the 9th-14th centuries, depending on location (obviously southern Germany & Netherlands were influenced earlier than Norway, Iceland, etc.) so if Latin Catholic influence is what they want to avoid, then the only truly German writing system of any kind must be Runes. I think it would be a wonderful thing to see that script be revived even in the 21st century to be used by various Germanic languages; the same with all indigenously developed writing systems that were displaced by the Latin script.
German cursive is influenced by runes.
This was very interesting.
Both are beautiful fonds
When I had German in primary school, one story in our reader was printed in gotiske bogstaver (the official name in Danish) or, as they were usually called, krøllede bogstaver (curly letters). It was called Üfod. Or so I thought. It was actually called Äsop.
I actually really like the Fraktur-font 😅
What is happening to every final syllable of every sentence ?
My mother used to get letters from German relatives in a script that she called chicken scratch, but from looking around the internet, I believe it was Sutterlein. (Said relatives were her parents’ generation and learned to write before WWI.
You should have included the DIN 1451 font family in your video, which is THE de facto font of all things official in Germany now, from road signs to decals on German trains.
Well, it almost fractured the nation.
lol but only politicians like Otto von Bismarck and intellectuals cared
I, a former playbill publisher, am deeply offended by the assumption I didn’t give a lot of thought to the font of each playbill. I always tried to choose one I felt respected the character of each show…
This was utterly fascinating. And I imagine this is the background to the rise of the Modern and Humanist typefaces? (And even explains why they're called 'Humanist')
And also, we have the issue of the _Sütterlin_ handwriting script kind of thrown into this debate at times. In fact, I'm not sure if modern Germans can clearly read the Fraktur typeface unless they had some schooling in 2024.
I learned reading with very old books is Fraktur Fonts. In the early 90s in a very small school in Germany. A skill I still have. I hope there wasn't too much stuff that was relevant between 1933 to 1945 in them.
editing error at 1:58
sorry if that bothers you now.
just thought i point it out
As a foreigner, being able to read Fraktur font gave me a huge level of credibility with the Germans when I lived in Germany.
The reason why Fraktur was abolished was because the national territory was expanded, temporary.
The new citizens simply couldn't read Fraktur. Germany has adapted to the fonts in the new areas.
With Fraktur the German long s = ſ was also abolished. This looks very similar to the small f.
But what remained was the ß, called ſʒ (long s + z) or today ss
The ſ hasn't been used in English for a long time.
Man reading Kurrentschrift is a pain in the ass and I love it when they swap from German to Latin, because then the writing is easier to decifer :D
Cool video
It amazes me to no end that a country was ready to throw away centuries of their written word because of this dispute. Today this divide prevents people from accessing the literal masterpieces written just a century ago, if they do not put in lots of effort to learn the forgotten script. Likewise with reading letters their grandparents wrote in Sütterlinschrift or before that in Kurrentschrift.
When I was a child I used the old English-German dictionary of my father which still the German version of the words written in Fraktur. In reality it is not so difficult to understand it, as long as you already know the language. At the beginning you have to guess some letters, but in a short time you recognize them without any problem.
Old German fonts are amazing and there’s a huge bunch available, I can spend hours on them, applying them to different texts.
😀
My partner's ancestry is from northern Italy, though that part of the world is right on the border with Germany, and has been considered German at times. He is built like a Viking warrior and/or sailor, and his son would fit quite well into H's favored phenotype. They're both wonderful human beings and I only have praise for either of them; thus video simply causes me to wonder which font either of them would choose.
Personally, I'm torn between the two. Antiqua is elegant and simple to read, though I dig the way Fraktur makes you work a little for your understanding. In junior high, I learned how to write in Gothic hand, which is a calligraphy that seems more related to Fraktur, so maybe I'm leaning that way, though I do like both. Yeh, I can see wars being fought over this.
I remember when books had a page that acknowledged the typeface.
as slovenian historian we studied fraktur and i quite hard to read becouse some letters like i and t are wierd
Does TH-cam also demonetize videos if you say "NSDAP" instead?
8:14 while claiming Bismarck to be 'a big advocate' of _Fraktur_ the man is shown in front of some writing in German which is certainly *not* Fraktur. btw, how would we call the font used to write the US constitution in 1787? the part of _WE the PEOPLE_ and _Article 1_ looks a bit funny...
Its true, almost nobody I know can read Fraktur, but whatever reason, I can. Mostly because I used to read old books
As person being raised with german as mother language, I always struggle to read old fracture texts without inner monologue with speech deficit 😂😅
For some decades I have had a 'Der Brockhaus Atlas' from 1937, partially written in Fraktur, that gives it a period charm. There is a rather bizarre juxtaposition in the illustration captions in the History section of Fraktur with a regular serif font when referring to Admiral Seymour's command during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, "The Germans to the front", that not being in Fraktur, possibly because English written in Fraktur would be just wrong. I had no idea about that dichotomy between Antiqua/Roman Catholicism and Fraktur/Protestantism, so thanks for covering that, Patrick. I do have to concur, however, with some comments here regarding your pronunciation, which can get quite distracting at times. You do need to control it a little better. I also find it strange that simply mentioning 'Nazis' and 'Hitler', in any context, can get a TH-cam channel de-monetised. That seems extremely draconian and stifling.
The reason for this is that Fraktur and Aniqua where not seen as two seperate typefaces but as different scripts, as such the situation is more akin to what you today have in Serbia, where the language can be written in both Latin and Cyrillic, but of course this wouldn't extend to other languaages.
@@nacaclanga9947 That's extremely interesting that you should have brought up the matter of Serbian, as that brings back an argument I had with somebody elsewhere on TH-cam who was trying to make out that Slovak was nothing more than a dialect of Czech, which is simply not the case. They actually added that Serbian and Croatian were much more different from each other than were Czech and Slovak, which further mystified me, as I'd long been under the impression that Serbian and Croatian are effectively the same language - ie., Serbo-Croat - the only difference being that the former is written in Cyrillic, while the latter is written in Latin. If Serbian can indeed be written in Latin, too, that makes Serbian and Croatian yet closer to each other.
I don't know of anyone else is like this, but I'm able to read words written in fraktur better than I am in any other font
Same
same
I literally have my phone set to it and my handwriting kind of looks like it too
@@robinrehlinghaus1944 same
@@robinrehlinghaus1944 cool! What do you mean your handwriting looks a little like Fraktur? Are you writing not cursive?
to avoid censoring, i have came up with a name, so his group would be known as Enzets, and austrian painter himself would be Ayyf/Ayyn Hyyl or Ayf Hyr.
Font Explain!
Fraktur is beautiful.
It is one of the paradoxes of communication that language and even typeface do not always serve the purpose of communication, but rather their exact opposite, that of demarcation.
Es ist eines der Kommunikationsparadoxien, dass Sprache und ja selbst die Schriftart nicht immer der Verständigung dienen, sondern auch zu ihrem genauen Gegenteil, der Abgrenzung.
Hello everyone!
Recently and almost by pure coincidence I have been doing something related to Fraktur in it's more natural meaning of a font...
I'm talking about how Germans did handwritting. And it seems that they didn't only saw the Fraktur/Black letter fonts as a weird way to type stuff on paper but also their handwritten version of the letters changed a lot to what we're used today.
I'm specifically talking about Kurrentschrift. That later was simplified to Sütterlin and then Offenbacher made it's own version but never got the recognition...
Also, thanks to Kurrentshcrift and it's versions is that "ẞß" exists! Since the Eszett is a ligature of the "long s"/ "ſ" and and cursive "z" / "ʒ".
Also the Umlauts! As "Ää", "Öö" and "Üü" were initially written as , and ... The lowercase "e" started to come on top of the past letter (Just like "Ññ" was initially ). But, if you already have seen Kurrentschrift, you have noticed that the lowercase "e" looks like 2 lines or rather two 1's. So initially they were 2 lines but after some time they got simplified to the dots we know today. Isn't that interesting?!
I think it should be a good point to comment in this video or another specifically because all old documents written by hand before "That" event you've talk about at the end of the video were written in Kurrentschrift! And even today we can find some resemblence of this on some stores and cultural stuff on Germany.
Personally I do like how Strongly German those letters look and how rather easy they are to write with!
Yes