Blackletter: Type & National Identity

Blackletter type, also known as Fraktur or German Gothic, originated with Gutenberg’s moveable type, and was based on the contemporary calligraphy of that time. (A man of his time making the types of his time. That makes sense.) From the sixteenth century on, it shared the spotlight with roman type in German-speaking countries and was even adopted for the printing of Martin Luther’s writings. Yet by the twentieth century it was increasingly spurned by both commercial artists, who embraced roman type for its classical associations, and modernist designers, who championed sans serif type for its universal and democratic qualities. At the close of the Second World War, the identification of blackletter with failed Nazi ideology was inescapable, thus effectively ending the four-hundred-year tradition of blackletter as a distinctive national script. This is the story of those 400 years. (More or less.)