Die Deutsch-Schriften

I'm a bit of a font nut and thought I'd look into the history of European typefaces. For starters: Ever heard of Helvetica?

How about now?

Helvetica is freaking everywhere and even has a recent documentary devoted to it, which I promise has you on the edge of your seat but it's hard to find good clips.

As you can see there are many variations on the font, such as narrower letters, rounded ends, heavier strokes, etc. but the underlying forms are the same. Helvetica is the most widely used typeface in the world. It was actually invented in Switzerland in the 1950s but Germany has its own history of well-known lettering. You're probably familiar with Old English, or at least the Microsoft Word version of it:
There is also an Old English language, a recent ancestor of what is now spoken in Britain and the US. But it turns out die altenglischen Sprache war nicht geschrieben mit altenglischen lettering. Old English - die Sprache - ist alterer als die Schrift. Incidentally, Germany has its own versions of ye olde fancy scripts dating from various ages, most famously Blackletter from medieval times. It was used throughout Europe for a few hundred years but Germany was slow to adopt it and last to stop using it - hence it being associated with Germany today. It does still appear in unexpected places, like the Bad-Bellingen train station in rural southeast Germany.

Yes, I took a photo of script on the side of a building. Don't judge me.

Blackletter is not a specific "font" in the computer sense. It encompasses families of lettering with cool names like Fraktur, Textualis and Cursiva, the main three historically used in Germany. One cool feature of fonts how much history they have behind them, because many of their features were meant for ease of writing or, later, pressing. Fraktur is in fact evolved from a calligraphic script. Blackletter is also known as Gothic letter and its distinguishing feature is its broken lines, as compared to "antiqua" styled fonts which have smooth forms with less interruption. Antiqua tends to be more legible and is (I believe) the type of writing you'd see on the signs and menus at an old-timey German restaurant like the Heidelberg or Metzger's.

In case you think this stuff doesn't matter to people, the Gutenberg Bible (first book ever printed with movable type) was printed in 1455 using textualis, a type of blackletter, and even Hitler had an opinion on fonts: In 1941, after a long dispute probably only famous in very particular circles, the Nazis officially phased out fraktur fonts in favor of antiqua.

Now you know. Think about the lettering next time you see an ad, and thank or curse Europe at will.