Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.
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A lot of them use "Olde English" style blackletter fonts instead of German Fraktur, possibly because they can't read it.
Alas, yes. (Though compare the Anarchistische Pogo Partei Deutschlands.)
Of course, these wannabe guys use the proper fraktur. They usually use the wrong s and don't care about proper ligatures.
The APPD is using Fraktur in the punk rock tradition, which I think is from the UK, where using an "enemy" font had shock value.
Is this why some heavy metal groups use umlauts all over?
Point 2 in Eco's ur-facism essay:
"The rejection of modernism"
> Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.
And many of them use Fraktur wrongly (in particular: wrong usage of long vs round s; not using compulsory ligatures).
Oh yes, let's grammar-nazi the nazis.
not /s
I don't think it's an attempt at correcting neo-nazis, but rather indirectly says that they only seem to use it as a signal: they don't care about (proper) use at all, just want to associate themselves with a (glorious?) past through marketing.
It’s a bit like right-wing Christians. They have a very shallow understanding of their sacred texts, but that doesn’t stop them from acting the way they think they should act because of what they misunderstood about Christianity.
I ask in "good faith": Name one thing we shallowly misundersand.
Not the person you ask, but Christians do have a habit of selectively applying scripture. Above all, right-wing Christians seem ill at ease with the bits about turning the other cheek, the good Samaritan, stewardship, greed, etc.
Ostentatious religious behavior (such as public devotion) while ignoring quite a bit of the core message of Christ comes across as shallow. The clearest case is Trump, who has possibly broken all 10 commandments, and commits 6 out of 7 cardinal sins.
Now, associating that with all right-wing Christians is probably a generalization, but this image is not helped by their leaders, and the complete lack of visible opposition against them.
> Oh yes, let's grammar-nazi the nazis.
Using wrong letters and ligatures (in Fraktur) has barely anything to do with grammar; this is rather orthography.
I wonder how much that's due to reverse polarization causing modern far right to copy Nazis from Hollywood or videogame depictions of Nazis, which tended to use Fraktur as a signifier.
“Reversing the polarity of the Nazi field” is some serious Star Trek-level technobabble.
Same fun when they couldn't decide if they were for or against Sütterlin scripture.
They also like to drive Simson motorcycles.
Despite the Simson family being Jewish (and publicly calling out against the AfD).
They dress with "Fred Perry" -- look it up yourself, how paradox that is.
The right-wing likes to talk about the German heritage of the "Dichtern and Denker" (poets and thinkers) and yet the Third Reich was stupid enough to kill or at least exile most.
They like to talk about /clean blood/, /natural order/ despite biology having a different opinion which it clearly shows when inbreeding happens (also due to xenophobia).
Their /family values/ are indistinguishable from the islamists they pretend to fight.
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The list of paradoxes never ends.
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You cannot argue with stupids
I’m in the process of learning Sütterlin / Kurrent for genealogical purposes. While Fraktur is easy to learn, Kurrent is just horrible, even though the textbook I used, written in 1995, still declares it a superior handwriting cruelly banned by the Nazis.
If 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.
That's why I said "main motivation", i.e. what actually caused them to follow through. The initial idea wasn't ideological either - not following from ideology doesn't mean it's pragmatic (in fact I'd argue those two aspects are orthogonal) and that it wasn't born out of pragmatism only reaffirms my statement that the Nazis were opportunists, not pragmatists.
A lot of things boiled down to post-hoc ideological justifications for the personal preferences of Hitler and his ilk. Even the racism was incoherent - it's cliché to point this out but Hitler himself infamously looked nothing like an Aryan übermensch despite the Führer cult treating him akin to a divine figure. This is consistent with research indicating disgust as a strong motivating signal in right-wing politics.
I had a chance of attending a lecture by Albert Kapr, maybe a year or so before he died. His book on typography was, essentially, the "Bible" for anyone studying typography in the 60s-90s in the former Soviet Union, probably still is. Our typography coursework was, essentially, designed on his book's (the Art of Lettering) examples. I've also seen some historical books printed in Germany some preceding Nazi rule, some during and some shortly after.
I'm almost hundred percent sure I've seen Mein Kampf seen set in Schwabacher which was printed while Hitler was still alive, but I'm not sure on the exact year. I'm also certain I've seen Hanns Johst's plays posters set in (stylized) Fractur. I'm sure you can find the Nibelungen posters with the same kind of (stylized) font from that time.
So, at least in the way things are presented in Kapr's book, and I think it was understood that way even before him, Fractur has much to do with the development of printing, especially the part where individual letters were reused (early printing used to etch the entire page at once). Germans would have a reason to be sentimental about that font because, after all, they were the inventors of this kind of printing. I could see how this would be in line with nationalism.
Similar, for example, in Russia, the stylized variant of pre-Peter I (a.k.a. "early Cyrillic" or "church-Cyrillic") is still a popular choice for all sorts of nationalist propaganda posters, even though it was replaced in the late 16 hundreds.
Similar, in Ukraine, there are fonts that strongly associate with nationalism, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_skoropys and Georgij Narbut's font: https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-86142.html even though they are impractical and aren't used for everyday tasks.
In Hebrew, there's Hayim font, that strongly associates with the Zionism / Socialism movement of the pre-declaration of independence and soon after, but the font otherwise isn't very useful for modern everyday needs.
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Bottom line: I don't think Nazis represent the whole spectrum of nationalism. On the other hand, nationalism will find and glorify original local developments, in typography just like in any other field.
My reading of Nazis is that nationalism wasn't their main goal. Their appeal was "law and order at any cost", "removing impediments to prosperity, whatever they may be" much more so than digging up historical relics confirming the eternal greatness of Aryan people. Textbook nationalists are rarely expansionists: they may be hostile to their neighbors having claims to some historically contested territory, but they don't normally launch conquest of far-away lands. The later seems to be more of a thing of people with more universal ideologues.