Blackletter, as Paul Shaw and Peter Bain state in the introduction
to their catalog for the exhibition Blackletter: Type and National Identity(the
Cooper Union, April 1998 ), is shrouded in mystery, mystique, and
nationalism. The polar opposite of the geometrically based roman,
blackletter, they explain, “is often misleadingly referred to as Old English
or gothic [and] is an all-encompassing term used to describe the scripts of
the Middle Ages in which the darkness of the characters overpowers the
whiteness of the page.” It is based on the liturgical scripts found in
Gutenberg’s 1455 Mainz Bible and precedes Nicolas Jenson’s earliest roman
alphabet by fifteen years. Blackletter developed throughout German-
speaking Europe during the fifteenth century in four basic styles: textura
(gotisch), rotunda (rundgotisch), schwabacher, and Fraktur. It has been
reinterpreted in various manifestations and styles. The essays and time lines
that comprise Shaw and Bain’s catalog trace the dialectic between
blackletter and roman and set the stage for the even more fascinating
ideological issues inherent in the history of the type form.
Blackletter was always much more than an alphabetic system.
The most illuminating essay in Blackletter,Hans Peter Willberg’s “Fraktur
and Nationalism” offers a vivid narrative of blackletter’s ideological
development. Prior to the Napoleonic wars, for example, tensions between
the German states and France inflamed virulent nationalism, which
encouraged official recognition of Fraktur as theGerman type, bestowing
upon it the same passionate allegiance as a national flag. Throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, blackletter symbolized the best and
worst attributes of the German states and nation. In the 1920 s Jan
Tschichold (a leftist who briefly changed his name to Ivan in solidarity
with the Bolsheviks) denounced “broken type” as nationalistic, while
Rudolf Koch, who also designed the sans serif Kabel as well as his own
version of Fraktur, supported, to quote Willberg, “the ‘German Way of
Being,’ which manifested itself in the ‘German Way of Writing.’” Other
considerations, such as rationalism versus romanticism, later entered the
debate for and against blackletter. The German left used Fraktur almost
as much as the right, yet the type has been criticized most for being
“Nazi-letters.”
Given the negative perception of blackletter, one might presume
that, after the Nazis’ defeat in 1945 , the type would have forever fallen into
disrepute. But, as Yvonne Schemer-Scheddin explains in her essay, “Broken
Images: Blackletter between Faith and Mysticism,” an astute analysis of
past andpresent usage, the type was retained by those businesses for whom
conservative or traditional values could best be symbolized through Fraktur
(including those in the fields of gastronomy and beer production as well as
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1