Among the many fruitful and near-miraculous reforms of the Turkish Revolution enacted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, none perhaps is as unjustly denounced as the alphabet reform. Many other countries too either planned to go through similar reforms(such as China and Kazakhstan) and some other countries(such as Korea and Azerbaijan) actually did. One such country that successfully changed its way of writing is ignored by most people, this country of course is Germany.

 

Germans used to write with the Fraktur script developed by printers in Holy Roman Empire. This was in contrast to the Antiqua which was seen as a more foreign script. This divide was emphasized more by printers that used Fraktur for German texts and Antiqua for foreign words. While this divide might seem small, it is worth noting that typed Fraktur is very hard to read by those unfamiliar and Kurrent, the handwritten equivalent of Fraktur, is almost impossible to read even for the German youth of today that grew up without learning it  --Hence the title of this article.

 

After the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire, German nationalists began to look for things that would unify the now-fractured Germans and distinguish them from other nationalities. Fraktur, used by all Germans, not used by many foreigners(most importantly France, who was an important common enemy), being associated with the German language, and being made by Germans quickly became one of the things that filled this role. 

 

This enthusiasm got so high that German people began seeing Fraktur as a national symbol, many outright refusing to use Antiqua. Even famous German chancellor Otto von Bismarck was known for returning German books written in Antiqua gifted to him, usually with a  note saying “Deutsche Bücher in lateinischen Buchstaben lese ich nicht!” (I don’t read German books written with Latin letters).

 

The demise of the “German script” came from an unexpected source. Adolf Hitler banned Fraktur in favour of Antiqua in 1941 as he found Fraktur “unfit for the modern age” and ugly. After the Second World War, many did not see the need to revive Fraktur in a world more globalized than ever before.

Oğuz Kaan Kömürcü

Sophomore

Civil Engineering