blackletter

'Germany was the last bastion of blackletter (fraktur), the heavy, jagged typefaces based on monastic script that had been in use since Gutenberg. . . . [A]lthough blackletter represented a very traditional, inward-looking German culture, it had also been a symbol of national identity when that identity was under threat. . . . [T]he period of Napoleon's domination of the continent gave blackletter a symbolic role as a beacon of a national culture under attack from outside forces. . . .

The first Chancellor of united Germany, Otto von Bismarck, claimed that it took him considerably longer to read a page of text set in roman than it did one set in blackletter, which supports the theory that peple find legible that with which they are familiar. . . .

Although blackletter experienced official party backing as the true and only style of German lettering in the early years of the Third Reich, it never existed to the total exclusion of other forms. . . . But to Hitler blackletter was synonymous with patriotism and a deep feeling for German culture.

Then, suddenly . . . [i]n early 1941 a decree outlawed blackletter as a Jewish innovation into the printing trade. Roman was now to be the standard.

The probable true reason for this about-face was . . . [that] Germany now had many conquered territories in which blackletter was not a legible face; its use hindered the spread of German ideas abroad. . . . It has also been suggested that a factor . . . was complaints by German pilots that it was hard to read at a distance when used for aircraft markings.'

'Simon Loxley, Type: The Secret History of Letters, 2004.