How did medieval French handwriting become “the Nazi font?”

And why did Hitler make it illegal?

In the 5th century AD, a collection of Germanic tribes called the Goths sacked Rome. By the 10th century, their language, alphabet, and identity were extinct. Yet, in 1941, Adolf Hitler banned the Nazi party from using what he called “Gothic letters”. Hitler was referring to a style of writing that had developed in medieval France and England and had nothing to do with the historic Goths, yet somehow since the Middle Ages had become synonymous with Gothic people, who themselves had become synonymous with the modern people known as Germans.

Today, sticklers will tell you that the proper term for these typefaces is blackletter, but the Gothic label remains prevalent. And, despite Hitler’s best efforts, they remain associated with right-wing and white nationalist movements. So, how did this historical tangle come to be?

This is the story of two fonts battling for dominance. One is the “Gothic” family, now largely fallen out of usage. The other is the “Roman” font, which provided the basis for most of the typefaces we use today.

Both styles of text share a common ancestor in the form of Carolingian minuscule, a style of handwriting that developed in the late 8th century under an illiterate emperor named Carl. Today, Carl is remembered as a shrewd military leader, uniter of Europe, and first of a thousand-year line of Holy Roman Emperors. His popular legacy as “Carl the Great”—more often Charlemagne in the Anglosphere—is rarely attributed to his involvement in handwriting standardisation, despite the fact that the very letters you’re reading now wouldn’t exist without him.

Charlemagne had inherited a fractured Europe. In the centuries since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, political and cultural divides had deepened. To bring these fragments of Europe together under the same legal rule was not enough. Charlemagne didn’t just see his role as a political one: his Emperor was a spiritual leader, too, one who would reign over a peaceful Europe unified by a shared church and shared Christian rites.

Though by most accounts Charlemagne could read only poorly and could hardly write, he understood that education would be crucial for making this dream a reality. Under his supervision, scholars were summoned from across Europe to create the foundation for centuries of Christian scholarship to come. In what is now known as the “Carolingian Renaissance”, classical learning was revived and Roman aesthetics flourished in art and architecture, lending a sense of historical precedent to the Christian future.

Carolingian Christian manuscripts illuminated in a naturalistic, Roman style, incorporating classical motifs. Left: British Library, Add. 37768, f.5 Right: British Library, Harley 2970, f.3v

Carolingian minuscule was a product of this Renaissance, a synthesis of ancient Roman capitals and the lower-case (or “minuscule”, more properly) letters that had developed in various local handwriting styles in the interim. Created to be consistent, elegant, and easily legible to scholars around Europe, this wasn’t a script for everyday use by clerks and lawyers. It was meant to glorify and codify the word of God. Luxury Carolingian manuscripts such as the Ramsey Psalter below show how comfortably this writing style extended and fit alongside classical aesthetics.

British Library, Harley 2904, f.144

Unfortunately, the artistic and political unity fostered by Charlemagne wasn’t meant to last. His empire fractured, many classical texts ceased to be studied, and the Romanesque styles of the Carolingian Renaissance gave way to the Gothic movement.

In northern Europe, away from Rome, the Gothic tradition was embraced in its most extreme forms. Cathedrals were bedecked with elaborate tracery and church spires extended higher and higher into the heavens. The spiky ornateness of Northern Gothic architecture was mirrored by the handwriting used in luxury manuscripts. Slowly, Carolingian minuscule became more and more detached from its Roman roots. Writing styles like textualis quadrata eschewed almost all curved strokes in favour of geometric forms. England and northern France were the heartlands of this style, which in reality had nothing to do with the historical Gothic peoples and was not even called “Gothic” until long after its heyday. In fact, Germany, the homeland of the Goths of yore, was rather slower to adopt these aesthetics, though they eventually did.

Textualis quadrata text in the 15th-century English Sherborne Missal

A serif-less style called textualis prescissa in the 14th century English Sherborne Missal

Further south, people weren’t quite so keen to leave Rome behind. Italian late medieval architecture incorporated many Gothic features, but these shared the stage with traditional, more restrained Romanesque elements. Once again, the same dynamics played out on the page. Italian and Spanish elites favoured a type of script called Rotunda, which blended sharp Gothic calligraphy with gentle curves.

Rotunda script in a 15th century Italian manuscript

Nevertheless, Italian scholars still began to tire of the influences that had made their way across the alps. Beginning in the late 13th century, Italy had become the heart of a movement to return to classical study. Previously forgotten works were rediscovered and fields like history and literature, long neglected, were brought back to the forefront of academia. The scholars leading the way couldn’t help but feel a tension between the principles of the ancients and those that recent history had propagated.

The philosophical backbone of the Renaissance was called humanism because it sought to re-centre human beings as an intellectual and artistic focus—their anatomy, stories, and minds. In this context, the Gothic movement seemed like an encapsulation of a philosophy rapidly becoming outdated. In its unrelenting march toward ever-greater opulence, humans had rather gone by the wayside. The frenetic, jagged cathedrals seemed designed to intimidate the mind and exhaust the eye, yet simultaneously lacked weight and presence. And the distinctive blackletter handwriting was hard to read and an absolute pain to write.

In the fourteenth century, the Italian scholar Petrarch wrote extensively about his issues with impractical handwriting. Petrarch praised older styles of writing (“littera antiqua”) for their legibility. He was referring especially to the pre-Gothic Carolingian scripts, which were used in the early medieval copies of classical works that had begun to be rediscovered. How neat and sophisticated those round little minuscules seemed! How orderly and refined those pages were with their airy spacing and restrained embellishment! This Antiqua writing was surely how classical authors were meant to be read. Copying Lucretius into blackletter was like serving up champagne in a pint glass. Just not right.

As more forgotten ancient texts resurfaced, the link between their handwriting and content became stronger. Thus, 14th and 15th century Italian scholars, especially in Florence, began to consciously incorporate Romanesque influences into their scripts with the hope of creating a medium appropriate for transmitting humanist thought. By the mid-15th century, works by the likes of Plautus, Cicero, and Caesar were circulating around Europe with a stylish new look inspired by the very old. Scholars referred to this handwriting style as “Antiqua” as if to suggest that they were merely picking up what Gothic writers had neglected. And indeed, 15th century Antiqua does very closely resemble its forbears. Compare the following sample from a lectionary, written in Trier around 1000 AD, with a paragraph of Plautus from around 1480 AD, written in Rome.

Walters Art Museum, W.9, fol. 13r

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 138, fol. 30r

It was this revived taste for the classics that gave us the label of “Gothic” in the years following the Middle Ages, since this vulgar art had seemed to infiltrate from the other side of the Alps just as the historic Goths, a collection of Germanic tribes, had swept down to sack Rome. Though the Goths had later been subsumed by larger tribes in Iberia and Italy, the humanists still identified them with the German speakers of their day. The fall of Rome, bad education, ugly churches—it was all written off as Gothic nonsense.

North of the Alps, these humanist ideas had yet to fully take root. Ever the pragmatists, the Germans had been busy with a different innovation entirely: moveable type printing. Thus, when Gutenberg’s first Bibles rolled off the press in Mainz in the 1450s, the word of God was in a blocky typeface very similar to the textualis quadrata handwriting used by local scribes.

Text from a first edition Gutenberg Bible

The Renaissance elites took some time to warm to printing, which put both the production of books in the hands of (largely German) craftsmen and merchants rather than Latin-speaking scribes. However, subsequent decades saw vast improvements to the printing process as well as the introduction of the first Antiqua typefaces, and it soon became clear that the scribe was fighting a losing battle against obsolescence.

By the early 16th century, Renaissance tastes had seen Antiqua displace blackletter across most of Europe for all types of printing. German-speaking areas remained the exception. Even as the Dutch and English left these old-school styles behind entirely, German typesetters tinkered with the dense quadrata forms to create newer, more elegant glyphs better suited to printing, such as the rounded Schwabacher which was soon usurped by the spiky Fraktur.

Letters from the prayer book of Maximilian I (1514), typeset in Fraktur.

Soon, the notion of blackletter faces as being the domain of the Germans was deeply entrenched. This had evolved beyond a mere regional preference. Blackletter type, especially Fraktur, had come to be seen as the appropriate vessel for the German language and culture, just as Antiqua had arisen and spread as the proper vessel for Renaissance thought. Thus, German printers customarily carried at least two sets of characters—Fraktur for the bulk of their work, and Antiqua to be inserted in the case of any foreign words used. Never mind that Germans hadn’t had much to do with inventing these letters—they owned them now.

A military dispatch from 1768 showing the parallel usage of Antiqua and Fraktur.

This entrenched the divide between Antiqua and Fraktur even further. The stark contrast between the two faces side-by-side on the page articulated a message about the uniqueness of the Germans and their tongue. It may seem strange that Germans should cling to something that the rest of the world had long written off as barbaric. However, barbarism was all the Germans had to call their own. The Renaissance had seen no resurfacing of ancient German writings. At the time of Caesar, there had been no German writings because no Germans could write. The same ancient sources whose rediscovery had fuelled the Renaissance and provided a rich substrate for Italian nationalism had provided only sparse information about the Germans, who were now beginning to ask themselves—What’s our story? What do we have to proud of?

The most detailed source on ancient Germans was a piece by Tacitus from the first century AD, devoted entirely to describing Germanic tribes. Tacitus had never ventured to the tribes’ lands himself. Why would he? Tacitus wrote in his Germania that the Germanic heartland was an impenetrable wilderness of swamps and dark forests which no outsiders ever bothered to visit. He described a collection of tribes thus almost entirely free from external influence or intermarriage, inhabited by a people tall, blue-eyed and light-haired, lacking any real laws, governed by consensus and merit. These Germans largely eschewed gold and silver, basing wealth more on quantities of livestock. Always ready to fight, they would sooner die than run from a battle or forgive a blood feud. Germanic women were no less fierce than men and would follow their husbands to the field of battle to egg them on, but at home they were caring mothers who birthed many children, and raised them to be tough like their fathers. Germans liked poetry and drinking. They lived in huts and holes. When people stepped out of line, they were beaten to death.

The picture Tacitus painted of Germanic life was vivid and compelling. It didn’t evoke much envy of their circumstances, but it did encourage a certain amount of respect for how they coped. It was mostly made up, of course, written to illustrate to the decadent Roman elite how they had left behind their own rustic, virtuous roots in pursuit of wealth and comfort. In short, Tacitus’ Germania was utter fantasy, perhaps the first known example of the “noble savage” stereotype deployed in writing. That actual Germans might read it 1400 years in the future and use it as the basis for an entire national movement probably never crossed his mind.

A painting of some romanticised Germanic warriors claiming a rightful victory over some Romans (artist: Otto Albert Koch)

A modern German artist’s fanciful (read: fake) idea of ancient Germanic pagan rituals (artist: Fritz Koch-Gotha)

But the Germans did just that. This was the key to unlocking the origin story that German humanists had so desperately craved. The same traits that the Romans had called barbarous were reinterpreted as virtuous in service of German pride. If the Italians’ inheritance was the equestrian statue, the colosseum, and the imperial palace, the Germans’ was the sword and the song. If Italian ambition had built Europe’s greatest empire, it had also been the source of their decadence and collapse. The Romans had never managed to conquer the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. But when the time had been right, those tribes had surged westward and southward into Rome and brought it down. The Germans hadn’t needed writing to make their mark on the world or to know who they were. German-ness was contained in the people, the land, the spirit, and the language—all of which were purer and nobler than any other.

Thus, blackletter writing, precisely because of its barbarian connotations, became an indispensable part of German culture, as sober and dark as the people themselves, as dense and impenetrable as their ancient woodlands. In the 19th century, the Romantic movement saw myth, magic, and folklore form the basis for a new wave of arts and culture, and Germans were right at the heart of it. Their nationalism grew as works like the Grimms’ fairy tales dredged more German heritage up from the mires of history, while authors like Goethe and Heine kept Germans at the forefront of contemporary culture. Of course, all of their books were printed in distinctly German blackletter typefaces.

However, as Germany struggled toward its 1871 unification, blackletter Romanticism became a matter of public debate. Antiqua was ubiquitous in almost every other country in Europe and it was inevitable that some Germans would come to prefer it. Latin had ceased to be the international language of scholarship, but many Germans continued to use so-called “Latin letters” when printing scientific works. To them, a universally recognisable typeface signified participation in the global community. Over the 19th century, more and more printing began to use Antiqua. For German nationalists, however, it became a sticking point that their language should be written exclusively in “German letters”. The Antiqua style was seen as a vessel for foreign influences on German language and culture. This fragile, fledgeling nation had fought off Napoleon and a thousand other threats for the sake of unity and the right to self-determination. Now, German-ness was a finite asset that needed to be guarded. It had to remain pure.

After German unification, the debate only intensified between the liberalising, cosmopolitan pro-Antiqua camp and the romanticist, conservative Fraktur lovers. In 1910, German publisher Adolf Reinecke released a 280-page book on the need to stand by Fraktur. His arguments were deeply rooted in the nationalist mythos that Germans had assembled. He compared the straight, angular shapes of Fraktur to those of Germanic runes, claiming that both were a result of the indomitable Gothic warrior spirit manifesting on the page. His sentiments were widely echoed in German society. In practice, though, both styles continued to coexist, and the trend away from Fraktur might have continued unabated had it not been for the rise of the Third Reich.

“Germany’s liberation”: a 1924 Nazi poster featuring Fraktur type

The Nazis deployed every possible weapon in the German nationalist arsenal, from the newest “science” to the oldest myths. Heinrich Himmler read Tacitus’ Germania in 1924 and henceforth became obsessed with it, vowing to resurrect Germanic society in its image.

The Antiqua-Fraktur dispute slotted in nicely to the Nazis’ imagined dichotomy of noble German Aryanism versus perfidious Jewish globalism. It is not difficult to understand why the Nazis loved their “Gothic” fonts or why early Nazi posters and leaflets were often typeset in Fraktur styles. Printers were warned off using “Roman” letters, the prevalence of which in newspapers was taken as a sign of Jewish control over the media. To everyone in the Nazi party, it seemed self-evident that Gothic writing was best suited to their cause. Everyone, that is, except Hitler.

Hitler himself was all in on mythmaking, but Europe was modernising. Mythology wouldn’t conquer Europe. Germans needed to look to the future; they needed to let go of their primitivism. In a 1934 speech to the Reichstag, Hitler denounced blackletter script:

Your alleged Gothic internalization does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far [...]

Perhaps in part because of his dislike, a selection of new, minimalist Fraktur typefaces were developed in the following years. These were enthusiatically received by the Germans, particularly the slick, futuristic Tannenberg. While the Nazi Party never adopted an official font, Tannenberg in effect served this purpose. It was used for postage stamps, road signs, and government publications internal and external. For a while, Tannenberg probably seemed like a happy medium that balanced the Nazis’ futurism with German heritage.

Two Nazi posters from the 1930s using Tannenberg-style typefaces. The left, an election poster, reads “Germany awakens!”. The right, a quote from Hitler, reads "We are fighting for the security of our people and for our living space”.

However, it wasn’t to last. On 3 January 1941, an internal memo circulated throughout the party: Hitler had officially banned Gothic fonts. The memo explained that the Führer had come to the understanding that so-called “Gothic letters” had, in fact, been letters of Jewish origin this whole time. Antiqua was to be designated “normal letters” and would from then on be the only acceptable typeface for party use.

What was framed as a purely ideological move was just as much a practical decision. Germany had already occupied Poland, France, and the Netherlands. If all went according to plan, these countries and more would soon be speaking German. And yet, in their printing houses, there was nary a Gothic letter to be found. Meanwhile, every German printer carried Antiqua letters. It was clear that so long as Fraktur and Antiqua coexisted, there would be tension between them. One of them had to go. And so, for largely practical reasons, it was Fraktur that got the axe.

Even with the end of the Third Reich, Germans never brought their beloved Fraktur back into books and newspapers. After 500 years of laundering barbarians’ reputations, blackletter type was finally consigned to the annals of history. These days, it is used decoratively to evoke its various historical connotations of things that are medieval, far-right, primal, traditional, or subversive. However, the few remaining remnants of the Nazi love of blackletter go largely unnoticed. In my ten years of living in Berlin, I never thought twice about that distinctive Tannenberg font, which adorns the WWII-era subway stations that carried me to school every day.