Antigone – Mein Kampf poster

Mein Kampf is a grotesque play by Hungary-born writer and theater director George Tabori. It deals with Adolf Hitler’s “Viennese years” as a resident of a men’s dormitory in the capital of Austria-Hungary before the First World War. In Tabori’s play, Hitler’s development from a naïve and thwarted art student to an anti-Semitic demagogue and later despotic dictator is interpreted in an exaggerated and sarcastic manner.

The world premiere took place on May 5, 1987 at Vienna’s Burgtheater. Seven years later, Antigone from Kortrijk, Belgium, produced a Dutch version. Translated by Ton Theo Smit and directed by Horst Hawemann, the play premiered at Rotterdamse Schouwburg on 29 April 1994. Hartwig Dobbertin provided the set design.

The poster was designed by Thomas Soete (b. 1971). He used FF Beowolf, “the original RandomFont” by Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum. If you look closely, you can see that none of the repeating letters is identical: the font included raw PostScript code that ran in the printer, causing the glyphs to juggle their anchor points on the fly. First released with FontFont in 1990, an OpenType version is now available directly from LettError, as LTR Beowolf. For technical reasons, the fonts no longer contains the subversive code, but emulate the random look through automatic alternates.

From the collection of the late Jan Middendorp.