159 points by buzzy_hacker21 days ago | 76 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.
BTW, Oliver Heaviside campaigned against Fraktur "German letters must go!" and I have to admit the do not look really good in math formulas, at least to my taste. He even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur (I didn't find the quote on the internet, so I have to look that up in my library if anyone is interested)
My high school English teacher chose Baskerville for the yearbook. This was back in the days when letterpress was still hanging on. Offset was mostly for short print runs. Both processes produced very fine resolution.
I remember when 300 dpi was a Xerox selling point while IBM was stuck at 240 for high speed printing. Now my cheap Brother does 600.
Serif fonts look better with higher dpi. Garamond tolerates lower dpi than modern serif fonts with finer features and curvatures.
I have a soft spot for Optima which is (was?) Xerox' official font, which coincidentally worked well on its printers.
I wonder how much that's due to reverse polarization causing modern far right to copy Nazis from Hollywood or videogame depictions of Nazis, which tended to use Fraktur as a signifier.
Yeah pretty much. Ran into this restoring old family documents—looked up Fraktur fonts to transcribe them, and every modern reference online is neo-Nazi shirts and Wolfenstein loading screens. Actual Weimar-era usage is buried. Media shorthand rewrote the association way harder than any real Nazi policy did.
Same fun when they couldn't decide if they were for or against Sütterlin scripture.
They also like to drive Simson motorcycles.
Despite the Simson family being Jewish (and publicly calling out against the AfD).
They dress with "Fred Perry" -- look it up yourself, how paradox that is.
The right-wing likes to talk about the German heritage of the "Dichtern and Denker" (poets and thinkers) and yet the Third Reich was stupid enough to kill or at least exile most.
They like to talk about /clean blood/, /natural order/ despite biology having a different opinion which it clearly shows when inbreeding happens (also due to xenophobia).
Their /family values/ are indistinguishable from the islamists they pretend to fight.
...
The list of paradoxes never ends.
...
If you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological. I'm pretty sure the "actually Fraktur is Jewish" argument wouldn't even have come up if Hitler and Goebbels hadn't already pushed for adopting Latin script. The Nazis weren't exactly pragmatists but they were always opportunists.
Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.
And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.
I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].
Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.
[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":
I had a chance of attending a lecture by Albert Kapr, maybe a year or so before he died. His book on typography was, essentially, the "Bible" for anyone studying typography in the 60s-90s in the former Soviet Union, probably still is. Our typography coursework was, essentially, designed on his book's (the Art of Lettering) examples. I've also seen some historical books printed in Germany some preceding Nazi rule, some during and some shortly after.
I'm almost hundred percent sure I've seen Mein Kampf seen set in Schwabacher which was printed while Hitler was still alive, but I'm not sure on the exact year. I'm also certain I've seen Hanns Johst's plays posters set in (stylized) Fractur. I'm sure you can find the Nibelungen posters with the same kind of (stylized) font from that time.
So, at least in the way things are presented in Kapr's book, and I think it was understood that way even before him, Fractur has much to do with the development of printing, especially the part where individual letters were reused (early printing used to etch the entire page at once). Germans would have a reason to be sentimental about that font because, after all, they were the inventors of this kind of printing. I could see how this would be in line with nationalism.
Similar, for example, in Russia, the stylized variant of pre-Peter I (a.k.a. "early Cyrillic" or "church-Cyrillic") is still a popular choice for all sorts of nationalist propaganda posters, even though it was replaced in the late 16 hundreds.
In Hebrew, there's Hayim font, that strongly associates with the Zionism / Socialism movement of the pre-declaration of independence and soon after, but the font otherwise isn't very useful for modern everyday needs.
* * *
Bottom line: I don't think Nazis represent the whole spectrum of nationalism. On the other hand, nationalism will find and glorify original local developments, in typography just like in any other field.
My reading of Nazis is that nationalism wasn't their main goal. Their appeal was "law and order at any cost", "removing impediments to prosperity, whatever they may be" much more so than digging up historical relics confirming the eternal greatness of Aryan people. Textbook nationalists are rarely expansionists: they may be hostile to their neighbors having claims to some historically contested territory, but they don't normally launch conquest of far-away lands. The later seems to be more of a thing of people with more universal ideologues.
Same arc as gothic metal band logos in the 90s adopting runes/blackletter after skinheads had already claimed them - symbol gets stripped of original context, reused as tribal marker. Saw this with Confederate flag iconography on trucker CB culture too, different decade same mechanism.
Ranted in the Reichstag, sure, but did it change outcomes? Fraktur got banned in 1941 anyway, officially called "Jewish letters" by the same regime that pushed it for years. Opinion or just convenient pretext for whatever he wanted that week?
It makes me laugh every time that the Nazis' Glorious Germanic Heritage of the Aryan Masterrace Ancestors Fraktur script turned out to have been created by Jewish printers and they went "Nevermind, forget it" then choose Antiqua, which, to be frank, is not the most adapted typeface for small printed folio books and papers of the time (and still isn't today).
I didin't know that Hitler personnally disliked Fraktur, must have helped.
Fraktur needs some eye adaptation to read it fluently because we are not used to some ligatures anymore and the typographic conventions can be different in the late 18th / early 19th century (for instance the Grimm brothers advocated against the captitalization of German common names), but I find it quite legible.
I love Fraktur so much. When I look for books from Germans pre ww2, I always go for the ones in Fraktur. The aesthetic is so beautiful and pleasing. Just yesterday, I acquired two books , one from Schopenhauer and one from Kant in prints from 1860 and 1890 respectively. Still looking for a Faust in Fraktur, but they are really expensive …
f*ck Hitler for banning Fraktur. it would be awesome if we Germans would still use it.
Remember December 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor's decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move ?
In a choice of either Times New Roman or Calibri, I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better. Calibri is a relaxed, modern typeface, while Times is classical and majestic. (The word "stately" also comes to mind.)
It would probably be better if State Department would get their own typeface -- as opposed to picking one from MS Office defaults -- but even then, I'd argue for Antiqua style (serif). SCOTUS, for one, is using Century Schoolbook.
P.S. I don't care at all about Rubio, Dem-Rep divide, "diversity" vs "wastefulness" debate, or any of the arguments brought from either side in 2023 (when they changed Times to Calibri) or 2025 (when they switched back).
> Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics.
[…]
> 2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.^2
Gruber is no fan of the Trump administrator generally, but he thinks in this case it seems that they/Rubio got it right.
He also recently had a post on the various style guides of various US federal courts:
Funny thing is the Nazis actually banned Fraktur in 1941, called it "Schwabacher Jewish letters" in the memo and pushed Antiqua instead for occupied territories. Regimes flip-flopping on typefaces for symbolic reasons isn't new, just usually not this on-the-nose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)
Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.