Antiqua–Fraktur dispute

This led me to look up the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I for this extraordinary thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)

Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.

It's hilarious how this dispute captures the assumptions of each period... the 19th-century debate is completely unrecognizable.

BTW, Oliver Heaviside campaigned against Fraktur "German letters must go!" and I have to admit the do not look really good in math formulas, at least to my taste. He even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur (I didn't find the quote on the internet, so I have to look that up in my library if anyone is interested)

Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.

I love learning that Hitler had an opinion about fonts and ranted about them in the Reichstag.

I love Fraktur so much. When I look for books from Germans pre ww2, I always go for the ones in Fraktur. The aesthetic is so beautiful and pleasing. Just yesterday, I acquired two books , one from Schopenhauer and one from Kant in prints from 1860 and 1890 respectively. Still looking for a Faust in Fraktur, but they are really expensive … f*ck Hitler for banning Fraktur. it would be awesome if we Germans would still use it.

It makes me laugh every time that the Nazis' Glorious Germanic Heritage of the Aryan Masterrace Ancestors Fraktur script turned out to have been created by Jewish printers and they went "Nevermind, forget it" then choose Antiqua, which, to be frank, is not the most adapted typeface for small printed folio books and papers of the time (and still isn't today).

I didin't know that Hitler personnally disliked Fraktur, must have helped.

Fraktur needs some eye adaptation to read it fluently because we are not used to some ligatures anymore and the typographic conventions can be different in the late 18th / early 19th century (for instance the Grimm brothers advocated against the captitalization of German common names), but I find it quite legible.

See also the Blackletter imitation "bastard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_(typeface): The face is available in three weights: Spindly Bastard, Fat Bastard, and Even Fatter Bastard.

Remember December 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor's decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move ?