An election poster attacking the government of Adolf Hitler and promoting the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the March 1933 German federal election, the last election in Germany before the Nazi Party banned all other political parties.

The headline (“Reward 1,000 Reichsmark”) uses a version of Inserat-Grotesk schmal, possibly the schmalfett style of Phönix-Groteske by Krebs. The other typefaces are all by this Frankfurt/Main type foundry: the bulk of the text uses fette Merian-Fraktur, though there are two lines in schmale fette Brentano-Fraktur. The word “dass” at the beginning of each point is in halbfette Federzug-Antiqua, and the numeral in “Liste 2” likely is from Freihand-Groteske.

The poster was printed by the Offenbacher Abendblatt, a party-owned newspaper founded in 1874 which had to cease publication shortly after when the National Socialists came to power.

Description of the project from the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung website:

The initiative to save mainly Jewish children and young people from National Socialist persecution is the focus of the exhibition I said, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. The exhibition presents selected letters from five Jewish families. Each document conveys an aspect of the painful separation of parents and children. The letters provide an insight into the ambivalent emotions of the parents left behind in the Nazi state, who vacillate between the hope of a reunion and the fear of permanent separation.

T‍he exhibition took place at Paul-Löbe-Haus, German Bundestag, from January 31st until February 23rd, 2024. The exhibition graphics and campaign design were created by Distaff Studio, commissioned by the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung. The project was led and curated by Ruth Ur and the Freundeskreis Yad Vashem, the exhibition architecture was conceived by Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik. The texts were set in HAL Repost and HAL Four Grotesk, both published by HAL Typefaces.

Along with a poster campaign, which was awarded amongst the 100 Beste Plakate, a catalog was created for the exhibition, which is also available digitally. An impression of the exhibition can be viewed on YouTube.

From the website of Distaff Studio:

To this day, the Kindertransport is considered one of the most ambitious rescue operations to save children from certain death during the time of Nazi persecution. I said ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ presents five selected documents from five Jewish families. It depicts parents torn between the hope of reunion and the fear of estrangement and permanent separation, children caught between two worlds, and the host families trying to offer comfort.

Six displays showcase representative quotes on their front sides, while the backs tell the stories through numerous documents and photographs. The chosen blue, inspired by the ink of handwritten letters, unites all elements into a common narrative. Furthermore, we connect the media and the exhibition through a sender’s stamp. This stamp also links the individual quotes, which we carried out into the city as part of a poster campaign, their open wording building a bridge between the fates of the past and the experiences of the present.

In 1935, Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972) wanted to supplement his income by writing a detective novel. He created a pseudonym, Nicholas Blake, and published A Question of Proof. Over the following years, protogonist Nigel Strangeways, amateur investigator and gentleman detective, would appear in sixteen novels. The Smiler with the Knife (1939) “features a Fascist organisation plotting to overthrow British democracy.” [Wikipedia]

Shown here is the cover of an American paperback edition published as Popular Library no. 41 in 1945, with cover art by H. Lawrence Hoffman (1911–1977).

On the occasion of the exhibition Hanns Kralik – Mensch wie stolz das klingt. Art and Politics at Grafschafter Museum Moers, MWK crafted a compelling hardcover book and campaign. Kralik, a Moers native, endured Nazi persecution, spent time in a concentration camp, managed to escape, contributing to the Resistance and later heading Düsseldorf's cultural department. His diverse artistic legacy, spanning drawings, prints, and political art, includes the iconic Moorsoldatenlied sheet designed in Börgermoor concentration camp. Authored by Diana Finkele, Ulrich Hecker, and Ralf Zimmermann, the 224-page book delves into Kralik's work and poignant life.

The book design exclusively uses type from Floodfonts: the texts are set in Capitana, with quotes using the narrow italics of Ferryman. The lettering on the cover uses a yet unnamed and unavailable typeface in progress.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan by Boy de Haas (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Eichmann: His Career and Crimes is a book about Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. It was written by Charles Wighton (1913–?), a Scottish journalist who reported from post-war Germany, began studying Nazi war crimes, and attended the Nuremberg trials. The book was published in 1961, the year in which Eichmann was trialed in Jerusalem. Shown here is the cover of the Dutch edition, translated by A.J. Richel and published by Uitgeverij Het Spectrum in the Prisma Boeken imprint.

The haunting portrait depicts the SS officer in his uniform, with a face composed of dead bodies of Holocaust victims. The cover is signed “DOBE” or similar.

The typeface used for “Eichmann” is Mosaik. It’s the only published typeface design by Martin Kausche (1915–2007). Born in Stettin, he studied under F.H. Ernst Schneidler in Stuttgart and later in Berlin. From 1941, Kausche worked for the Organisation Todt. After the war, he settled in the Worpswede artist colony and designed book jackets for S. Fischer, among other publishers. His Mosaik was first cast in 1954, years after the Nazi regime was terminated. Stylistically the design has nothing to do with the simplified Gotischs that became popular in the 1930s. Stempel advertised it as “the latest manifestation of the uncial idea”. Why was it selected for this grim topic, then? It’s probably because Mosaik can still be commonly read as being linked to the German lettering tradition informed by blackletter, with its gnarly strokes and outmoded ductus for some glyphs. But unlike most proper broken script typefaces, it’s easily readable to a Dutch audience.

Today marks the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945.

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Letterform Archive. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Index card for Mosaik

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

A striking jacket design with a provocative question, set with one word per line and featuring Marvin’s seldomly seen question mark.

From the publisher’s description:

This book is based on the famous experiments conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, which concluded that given an adjusted, controlled environment, most of us will act in a manner at total odds with our normal behavior patterns. Dr. Hans Askenasy agrees with these findings, and presents, with compelling logic and scholarship, a most disquieting view: that the Nazis who carried out the murder of six million Jews were neither sadists, madmen or monsters. Most of us would like to think they were, for then the responsibility for the atrocities they committed could be placed upon a special class of criminals or lunatics essentially different from the rest of us. Auschwitz could not, we like to believe, have happened here – yet it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil. The author concludes that the main cause of large-scale destructiveness is not individual criminality, but social abnormality – a collective madness which we do not fully understand and with which we have not yet come to terms.

Hans Askenasy was born in Frankfurt in 1930 and emigrated to the United States in 1949. The psychologist wrote several books about the Holocaust. Are We All Nazis? was published by Lyle Stuart Inc. in 1978.

To uphold the memory of the terrible deeds of National Socialism, the Bremische Bürgerschaft (State Parliament of Bremen) commissioned Katerina Vatsella to curate an exhibition dedicated to the tragic fate of Walerian Wróbel, a young Pole who was sent to a farm in Bremen as a forced labourer.

Presumably out of homesickness and in the hope of being sent home, Walerian Wróbel set fire to the barn and was subsequently executed by the National Socialists at the age of 17.

The farmer's daughter Luise, who reported the case to the Gestapo and thus indirectly shared responsibility for his execution, is the great-grandmother of photographer Stefan Weger, one of the two artists who deal with Wróbel’s fate in their work.

The other artistic approach comes from the painter Krzysztof Wróblewski, who came across the story by chance during an art scholarship in Bremen in 2004 and whose interest was immediately aroused because of the similar surname.

The different perspectives raise important questions about guilt, responsibility, memory and the duty to come to terms with the past.

The graphic design for the exhibition, titled Walerian Wróbel. Zwei Blicke auf das Unrecht am jungen Zwangsarbeiter (“Walerian Wróbel. Two views on the injustice against the young forced laborer”), was conceived and implemented by the local design agency Oblik. They used two colours in their design to create space for images, texts and documents, provide focal points and differentiate the perspectives in terms of content. Inspired by Stefan Weger's photographic work, it also reflects colour accents from Krzysztof Wróblewski's painting.

The headline typeface Lucifer by Nguyen Gobber purposefully stands in strong contrast to the exhibits. As the designers of Oblik explain, the almost threatening, but also contemporary aesthetics of Lucifer help to generate the necessary attention needed for topics dealing with historical guilt.

Atkinson Hyperlegible, which was originally created for the Braille Institute of America, is used as a complementary typeface. Its particular focus on legibility made it a fitting typeface for running text in smaller sizes.

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Semana magazine prepares the great special “Atlas of Nazism in South America”, an x-ray of how this event affected the politics of some countries in the hemisphere, the key events during the war and the characters who were relevant in it.

Semana BT is a custom typeface family consisting of Semana Sans and Semana Serif, designed for an extended editorial use. It has humanistic features and organic strokes inspired by the main typographic characteristics of the logotype.

Our first traveling exhibition is titled Wohin bringt ihr uns? »Euthanasie«-Verbrechen im Nationalsozialismus (“Where are you taking us? ‘Euthanasia’ Crimes under National Socialism”). It made many new demands on our design: durable, robust material, the simplest possible assembly and dismantling, reversible without a trace, but still absolutely safe, with the smallest possible pack size and total weight, flexibly adaptable to different room situations … that’s how a traveling exhibition has beauty in itself! So we're all the happier with the result. The centerpiece is the 15 exhibition boards that are easily leaned against the walls. You don’t need a hanging system or drill holes and you can use long corridors and large halls. If necessary, they can even be placed in the room as a “cluster”. But first they stay with Topf & Sons in Erfurt for a while.

For the design of the exhibition we used Gräbenbach in various weights and Mono styles to get a historic yet human touch. In combination with an attention-grabbing signal color and a diffuse, multi-layered layout – which reflects the uncertainty addressed in the title – a concise style came together.

Alarm for a scandal

This is the Spanish edition of a non-fiction book originally titled Selling Hitler by British journalist and novelist Robert Harris. The book is from 1986, but has remained intriguing and popular enough for a new Spanish translation. Harris meticulously documents a dramatic blunder of a German weekly, which paid millions for “the original diaries by Adolf Hitler” and published its discovery as a sensational scoop. The book’s subtitle: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century. The scoop was soon discovered to be a nefarious swindle: the sixty vintage-looking booklets were in fact fabrications by a forger called Konrad Kujau.

The Spanish alternative publishing company Es Pop Ediciones published a new edition of the book’s translation in 2020. The book design is by the Pulpo Design studio, with whom Es Pop often works, and the cover is credited to Riki Blanco. As its main cover and headline font the designers chose Alarm, a heavy metal typeface designed by freelancer Heinz König and published in 1928 by foundry J.D. Trennert & Sohn in Hamburg-Altona. The typeface was then forgotten, but rediscovered in 2017 by Berlin type design initiative Fust & Friends, and carefully digitized by Andreas Seidel. Like the better-known Fanfare, a similar heavy metal display face from late 1920s Germany (which was actually used for an English version of the book), it oozes the atmosphere of pre-war German advertising without looking obsolete.

The author’s name on the cover and the spine uses Perpetua in all caps.

Inside the book, headlines in Alarm are paired with text set in Erato by Dieter Hofrichter.

The title page demonstrates that, unlike “true” blackletter typefaces, Alarm works well for all-caps settings, too. The author’s name is set in Perpetua Bold, and the dollar sign in the illustration is taken from Cassanett Outline. Last but not least, “Es Pop Ensayo” features Cheap Pine Sans.

Regular Fonts In Use contributor Jan Middendorp has submitted an article about the Spanish edition of Selling Hitler, featuring the Alarm typeface. This post is added in response: It’s about an older edition of the same book that, as Jan points out, uses the similar Fanfare.

Robert Harris’s detailed account of the fake Hitler Diaries and the stir they caused in 1983 was originally published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber. These images show the first US edition, published by Pantheon Books in 1986. As it is often the case with books (or films) that deal with topics related to Nazi Germany, the designer picked a typeface that has a “blacklettery” feel to it, without actually belonging to this typeface genre. After all, proper frakturs and related styles can pose a readability issue – not only for American or Spanish readers, but since several decades also for the majority of Germans. That’s were hybrid typefaces like Alarm or Fanfare come in handy. They exhibit the dark color and broken strokes of blackletter, adding the desired tough “Teutonic” look, but are unadorned and adhere to the skeleton that’s familiar to readers of roman type. Fanfare was first cast by the Berthold foundry in 1927, in the period of the Weimar Republic. It was designed by Louis Oppenheim, a graphic artist of Jewish origin who died in 1936.

For the title on the book jacket, the letterforms of Fanfare’s Condensed style were partly modified. The S that looks like a mirrored Z got a new form with diagonal top and bottom thirds, maybe to allude to the runic insignia of the SS. The lowercase g was equipped with a full descender – in the original, this letter barely reaches below the baseline. In H, the crossbar was replaced with a diamond that echoes the i dot (or is it also a visual pun referencing Hitler’s toothbrush moustache?). The secondary text is set in caps from Enge Block, a typeface that likewise originated at Berthold in the late 1920s. No designer is credited for the jacket design. The illustration seems to be signed by “S. Kelly”. In the 1980s, all the fonts shown in this post were available from Berthold Fototypes: In addition to the photo adaptations of the three Berthold originals, Weiß-Kapitale kräftig was carried under license from Neufville.

The title page features Weiß-Kapitale kräftig. This cut was added around 1950 to the series that started as Weiß-Initialen at the Bauer foundry in 1931.

The blurb on the back combines a red drop cap from Fanfare with text set in Berliner Grotesk Medium. Drawn by Erik Spiekermann in 1979, it’s a revival of what used to go as the halbfett style of the Block series.

Shock Waves is a 1977 horror movie about a group of tourists who are shipwrecked and land on an island swarming with aquatic Nazi zombies. It was directed by Ken Wiederhorn and stars Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams, and John Carradine.

The movie’s title is set in Tension for most materials, including at the start of the movie. In the trailer and opening title sequence, the title setting is also animated with a red-white stroboscopic effect, flashing the typeface’s horizontal line patterns on and off, and finally leaving just the awkward solid contours.

Other typefaces are mixed and matched for secondary purposes in different materials: the most common poster for the US market uses Helvetica Compressed and Helvetica for additional text, the trailer uses Venus, and the credits in the film itself are set in Univers.

This use of Tension is not to be confused with the use for the Shock paperback series by Richard Matheson (Dell) which coincidentally also includes a volume with the title of Shock Waves.

Trailer end card / credits

End credits

French-language variant poster

Flashing effect from the trailer

The second book from Ron Goulart’s Odd Jobs series, with cover art by Josh Kirby (1928–2001). From the back cover:

His name was Adolph Hibbler and he had escaped the doom of Hitler’s Reich by inventing the cryogenic deep freeze long before the rest of the world. As a human icicle he had been just a circus sideshow for many decades until he finally thawed out—in the 21st Century.

The trouble began with a series of mysterious events and the government had to call in Odd Jobs, Inc. But when Jake and Hildy Pace started uncovering the clues they found an odder job than any previous capers.

For a topic this bizarre, DAW Books had to call in ITC Honda. It’s in fact a pretty good choice: With its traces of modernized blackletter, Honda alludes to faces that were popular in Germany in the 1930s (cf. Wallau, Potsdam, Tannenberg), while at the same time offering the readability needed for an American paperback cover from the 1980s.

Rise of the Right is a zine created in response to the rising trend in right-wing politics in 2016-2017. The book explores this trend as a fad from the rise of the nazi party in the 1930s to the state of the political landscape in 2016.

This was created for a brief set by the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) and was awarded for its use of typographic excellence.

A3-size poster for a porcelain exhibition by Sorauer Porzellan A.-G., a company established in 1888 in Sorau, Prussia (today Żary, Poland) and destroyed in February 1945, shortly before the end of the war.

In-use examples from Berthold’s poster specimen for Deutschland, released in 1933–35 in five styles including an uncommon oblique. These exemplary uses show the schmalfett (bold condensed, 1933) which was available in metal in sizes from 6 to 96pt, and larger sizes in Plakadur or wood. Together with Potsdam, Tannenberg, National, Element and others, Deutschland was part of the surge of simplified blackletters issued in the first years of Nazi Germany. Many of them were named and advertised with a nationalist background, and the specimens often are littered with propaganda.

The secondary typeface printed in red (“Ausstellung”, “Kempinski Weinen”) is Fanfare. As Erik Spiekermann notes, it was designed by a Jewish designer, Louis Oppenheim (1879–1936), in 1927. The sans serif caps are from Berthold-Grotesk.

Poster ad for “tax-exempt sparkling wines” by M. Kempinski & Co. The wine company was founded by German-Jewish merchant Berthold Kempinski (1843–1910) in 1862. In 1937, a few years after this specimen was published, Kempinski’s son-in-law Richard Unger (1866–1947) was forced to sell the company and emigrate to the US. As a graphic sign of this “Aryanization”, the star in the logo (still visible on the labels shown here) was replaced by grapes. In 1941, the Jewish name Kempinski was changed to F. W. Borchardt.

Cover of the specimen folder

This specimen of Deutschland’s Plakat (poster) sizes contains twelve folded A3 and A2 sheets. Several of them are littered with Nazi propaganda — see the quote by Adolf Hitler, or the ad for the Nationalsozialistische Landpost, the organ of the Reichs-Nährstand, announcing a special “Blood and Soil” issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the Nazi Party notorious for their racist agitation.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

For your typographic holiday reading, here’s a find from a flea market in Berlin-Schöneberg.

Lieder zur Weihnachtszeit (“Songs for Christmastide”) was published by Georg Kallmeyer Verlag in 1940. Despite the poor condition, it looked like a charming booklet on first sight. The title on the cover is lettering by Hans Voigt. The typeface used throughout the book is a Fraktur that Paul Koch first cut in 1933 in a single size for his Werkstatt Haus Fürsteneck in Frankfurt, based on letterforms written by his father, Rudolf Koch. In 1937, three years after Rudolf Koch’s death, the Gebrüder Klingspor type foundry made it commercially available in a range of sizes as Claudius. Here it is combined with a typeface for musical notation also cut by Koch Jr. Nicely printed in red and black, the song book is enriched with illustrations by Heinrich Pauser, another artist of the Haus zum Fürsteneck workshop and a student of Koch Sr.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Illustrations are credited to Heinrich Pauser, who also designed typefaces. His debut, Semper-Antiqua, was released the same year. The pen script Petra followed in 1954. The booklet was printed by August Osterrieth.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The table of contents reveals that the numerals in Claudius are not tabular.

As soon as one starts reading, one is painfully reminded that the heyday of this workshop in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement coincided with Nazism, and that its members allowed those in power to coopt their talents for propaganda purposes. As beautiful as Claudius and the two-colored musical notation might be, the joy is spoiled by the content which is drenched in the unholy zeitgeist.

Editor Ilse Lang’s foreword was written on Christmas 1939, only a few months after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland and started the Second World War. The introductory text vaguely hints at the war (“the moving events of our day”), and the cultural revolution of the first years of the Third Reich (“all the songs that have been created over the past few years in addition to the old familiar ones, songs that will gradually feel equally familiar to us”). For a compilation of Christmas songs, there are indeed exceptionally few references to the biblical nativity story, or Christian elements in general. “Gott” (God) and “Engel” (angel) appear only twice, and are outnumbered by terms like “Stern” (star), “Licht” (light), “Nacht” (night), “Feuer” (fire), “Wald” (woods), etc. Santa Claus is replaced by a pagan “Sunnwendmann” (Solstice man). Instead of Mary, there is “Frau Holle” (Mother Hulda). And there certainly is not a single mention of the Jewish baby named Jesus.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The notes with square heads are printed black on red staves. Hans Reichardt lists Paul Koch’s typeface for musical notation in his pdf for the Klingspor Museum simply as “Musiknoten”. Koch wrote about this topic in articles for Imprimatur (“Neugestaltung des Notenbildes in Handschrift und Druck”, 1933) and Klimschs Jahrbuch (“Die Musiknoten im Buchdruck”, 1940).

Several of the included carols are by Nazi songwriter Hans Baumann who also wrote “Es zittern die morschen Knochen” (“The frail bones tremble”), the official marching song of the Reichsarbeitsdienst. In “Kind, die Sterne gehen weit” he prepares the German youth for the deprivations of the war years to come and calls for soldierly obedience: “Once you grow up you will need strong hands to master the hardships. A cold home and hard bread – stop asking questions.” His “Hohe Nacht der klaren Sterne” is a prime example for the new carols of the 1930s that should replace Christian songs like “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night”). Its success was based on the fact that it brought together key concepts of Nazi ideology such as “nature mysticism, mother cult and new birth” (Esther Gajek, see Michael Fischer’s entry in liederlexikon.de) without being clumsily obtrusive. In fact, the song continued to be popular after the collapse of Nazi Germany and is still sometimes performed in the modern day. The booklet ends on a belligerent note. “Gar fröhlich zu singen” (“To be sung gleefully”) predicts what to expect from the new year: “Viel Kampf, Heil und Segen und Arbeit fürwahr” (“Much fighting, salvation, blessings, and labor for sure.”) If you want to read more about Christmas in the Nazi regime, I recommend Faith Thomas’ feature for DW Online.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

It used to be common to mark omitted double letters with an overbar, especially for ‘mm’ and ‘nn’. These abbreviations come in handy when lyrics have to match the musical notes, see “da kom[m]t er her”.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The second line features an oddity of German orthography as used until the reform of 1996. When words are hyphenated at the ‘ck’ digraph, the spelling changes to ‘k-k’ (Brücken → Brük-ken).

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Like most metal typefaces, Claudius has compact umlauts with integrated dots (or strokes), see “Äpfel”. It comes with a number of ligatures, some of which can be observed here (ch ck ſi ſſ ſt). See the full glyph set on Gerald Lange’s Flickr page.

The temporary exhibition “Das Gelände: Dokumentation. Perspektiven. Diskussion.” at the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds takes a look at potential uses for the enormous Third Reich-era buildings in Nuremberg. The typography is printed on large panels hanging from scaffolding at different heights and on different layers, thus giving visitors many different perspectives. The exhibition typography that features in the exhibition is bold and clear.

Exhibition graphic design by Rimini Berlin. Exhibition architecture by Holzer Kobler Architekturen

Jonathan Cape, London 1978. Cover design by Raymond Hawkey, with centered caps from Windsor Elongated (and Times New Roman for the stamp).

This post provides a broad overview over the diverse cover designs for some of the editions of Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB, set in a United Kingdom conquered and occupied by Germany during World War II.

The first edition was published by Jonathan Cape in 1978, with a cover design by Raymond Hawkey (1930–2010), who was a friend and fellow art school graduate of Deighton. In an obituary for Hawkey, Rob Mallows quotes Len Deighton about Hawkey’s dedicated approach:

For SS-GB, […] Ray produced a book of British stamps complete with Hitler's head that stamp collectors cherish. He also had the photographer Adrian Flowers make a photo of Whitehall that could be exactly matched with a parade in Berlin to make a fake postcard of Hitler in London taking the salute of a march past.

This photo appears on the back of the dust cover.

Red and black is a recurrent theme. Unsurprisingly, several of the typographic choices are either decidedly British (Windsor!), or stereotypically (Nazi-)German, i.e. blackletter in general and schaftstiefelgrotesk in particular, see the Harper edition at the end of this post, as well as the title sequence for the current BBC series.

The title page seems to show the letters ‘SS-GB’ in Fette Fraktur, but what we actually are looking at is a fantasy ‘S’ (presumably built from other glyph parts), a modified ‘G’ (with the top right borrowed from ‘E’), and the letter ‘V’ standing in for ‘B’. The real fraktur thing was apparently deemed too difficult to decipher for the English readership.

Panther, 1979. While the ‘SS’ part resembles Futura Condensed Extrabold, ‘GB’ and the author’s name are in an unidentified heavy grotesque more in line with the English models, featuring caps of regular widths and a very closed and round ‘G’ with spur. The smaller text is probably Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed.

Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. The curly letterforms rather say 1900s (or, well, 1970s) than 1940s. They are probably custom drawn, and not from a typeface.

Coleccion Naranja, Bruguera, Barcelona, 1980. Banco has been chosen to approximate the angular SS runes.
The illustration shows jackboots (in German: Schaftstiefel) stomping over the Union Jack. This kind of boot gave its name to the derogatory term for the simplified gotisch typefaces that mushroomed in the first years of Nazi Germany.

Harper, 2009. The letterforms for the author’s name seem to be adopted directly from the Panther edition shown above. The first name was made a tad longer by means of stretching. Tannenberg (1934) is used for the title.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

There are several interesting typographic details to discover in this old business letter, like the top-connecting ‘ch’ ligature in Koralle that almost looks like an upside down psi (ψ). Or the fact that Koralle, like many of Schelter & Giesecke’s typefaces, came with an uppercase eszett (ẞ), which apparently was so ahead of the times that it got confused with a lowercase one here and ended up in the middle of a mixed-case word (see “Katharinenstraße”). Or the way how medium-wide Koralle and wide Aurora-Grotesk (VII) take turns in the list of products, despite the fact that both series were available in a range of styles and widths. Or the inconsistent spelling of the name “Geßwein” — with ‘ß’ in the letterhead, with ‘ſſ’ in the rubberstamp, with ‘ss’ in the signature …

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

The logo with the big red ‘G’ is not from a font, but was custom drawn. This kind of three-dimensional treatment was very much in vogue in type, too. For comparison: Arno Drescher’s Helion (Schriftguss, top) and Willy Schaefer’s Neon (C.E. Weber, bottom), two related typefaces that were both released in 1935.

There’s more to it, though — something eerie, which is not obvious at first sight. The company name is set in Tannenberg schmal, one of the first “jackboot grotesks”, or “New German typefaces”, as they were referred to in Klimsch’s Jahrbuch, released in 1933, months after Hitler seized power. It is named after the Battle of Tannenberg, a symbol of Teutonic nationalism and militarism, and was advertised as “truly German, […] a sign of the times” and an “expression of new German desire”. The letter was sent by the owner of a furniture store in Tübingen, five years into Nazi Germany, and is signed “Mit deutschem Gruss!” (literally “with German salute”), the written equivalent of the Nazi salute. Unlike raising one’s right arm, such a letter ending was never mandatory, and although the phrase can occasionally be found in business communication (alongside the more common and more explicit “Heil Hitler!”), its use was the exception rather than the rule. This circumstance — more so than the use of Tannenberg — suggests that the sender was not exactly opposed to the regime.

The bottom half of the letter holds a carbon copy of the reply by the addressed furniture agent in Stuttgart-Weil im Dorf, confirming the order. He, by contrast, used an innocuous salutation (“hochachtungsvoll grüssend” ≈ “Yours respectfully”). His name is Ludwig Steinthal, and he was Jewish. With the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, German Jews had been stripped of their citizenship and civil rights. Having been a target of discrimination and persecution including occupational bans before, they were now officially excluded from many public events and places — simply because of their religious affiliation. As of May 1937, Steinthal apparently was still able to somehow pursue his business, but not for long. One year later, he was imprisoned in the infamous Dachau concentration camp. It didn’t help him that he was married to a non-Jewish woman, nor that he fought for Germany in World War I. Until 1945, Ludwig Steinthal was detained in several Nazi concentration camps, but miraculously managed to survive in Theresienstadt. We know this today because his son Hermann shared his memoirs in a book published in 2008.

Ludwig Steinthal didn’t specify gotisch letterforms for his rubberstamp. His name is set in Bravour-Kursiv, a charming advertising face designed by commercial artist, graphic designer and film architect Martin Jacoby-Boy. Like Steinthal, Jacoby-Boy was persecuted for nothing else but being Jewish. After being banned from his profession, he fled Germany in 1933.

Let’s not forget about this history, especially not these days.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Front Cover with FF Bau

The original title of this book by Jack El-Hai is The Nazi and the Psychatrist. Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the end of WWII. It was first published in 2013 by PublicAffairs/Perseus in New York.

It has been translated from English to German by Henriette Heise. The book design was provided by Susanna Dulkinys, San Francisco. Published in Die Andere Bibliothek.

Back Cover with FF Bau

Close-up of FF Franziska

Close-up of a chapter page with FF Bau

Close-up of FF Franziska Italic