Deutsche Schrift: The Demise and Rise of German Black Letter

Abstract

AbstractFrom 1464 to 1941 German printers had the choice of using Black Letter or roman‐face fonts. The preference generally was for Black Letter face when the text in question was intended for the German‐speaking market only, and roman‐face when the text was in Latin, French or other languages that preferred this face. However, these demarcations began to grow blurred towards the end of the eighteenth century, and during the nineteenth century the question of which type‐face to use became a strident issue, known as the ‘Frakturstreit’. The ‘Frakturstreit’ was, however, dismissed at the stroke of a pen in 1941, when Martin Bormann denounced German Black Letter as ‘Judenlettern’ and issued an order that only roman‐face was from then on to be used as the normal face for printing German‐language texts. Yet since that time of effective abolition, German Black Letter has slowly begun to reappear, helped considerably by the digitalisation of many of these fonts in the 1990s. It is the struggle, the demise and the reappearance that the present article seeks to address.