alt Hacker NewsIf you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological. I'm pretty sure the "actually Fraktur is Jewish" argument wouldn't even have come up if Hitler and Goebbels hadn't already pushed for adopting Latin script. The Nazis weren't exactly pragmatists but they were always opportunists.
Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.
And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.
I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].
Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.
[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":
https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/643190/7855da277bbd33...
References:
Art. 116 GG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_116.html
> If you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological.
But that isn't quite what it says either. Pragmatic considerations may have given the decisive push, but it seems that Gothic script had always been in a precarious position on the faultline between the archaising and modernising instincts of Naziism. The specific tall story that was eventually presented about how it was Jewish was quite clearly a low-effort post-hoc justification, but it seems it was always quite easy to take an anti-Fraktur stance from a Nazi perspective: see A. Hiedler, op. cit. And even just going on the small extract provided from that Reichstag speech https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/luftwaffe... , it seems that Hitler's objections weren't just pragmatic: before he gives a practical reason to drop Fraktur, he attacks Gothic revivalism in general on aesthetic grounds, no small matter to the Nazis. My assumption is that his objection to Gothic revivalism was based partly on a general aesthetic instinct that too much revivalism is cosplay and naff; and partly on a disapproval of medieval Germany specifically as a model or claimed precursor for Nazi Germany, for various reasons. A possible third, type-specific, factor, mentioned in https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/luftwaffe... , is that compared to "Atiqua" "Fraktur" looks vaguely kinda more Hebrew-ish. That could plausibly have been the underlying sentiment behind the (apparently completely false and baseless https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/nazi-typeface-fraktu... ) story spun about Jewish printers in Schwabach.