You Den Let Turn is a love letter to the Blackletter family of typefaces. It's also an examination of a strange moment in German history that continues to have impact today.
A debate raged for centuries in German-speaking lands about which typeface to use in print. Blackletter (known as Fraktur in German) was commonly used in printed books. Words of Latin or foreign origin were printed differently, using a family of typefaces referred to as Antiqua and which we still use today with fonts like Times New Roman.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, Fraktur was associated with German nationalism. When the National Socialists rose to power, they used Fraktur. But all that changed in 1941, when the NSDAP banned all Fraktur typefaces, claiming that the Blackletter typographic family had Jewish origins.
Today, many Germans associate Blackletter with the Far Right, an anomaly considering the historical ban. Tombstones in Jewish cemeteries in Germany commonly had bilingual inscriptions, with Hebrew on one side and German written in Fraktur on the other. It's as if German Jewry tried, even beyond the grave, to demonstrate that they could be German and Jewish at the same time.
Two things remain constant: Fraktur signs continue to exist, and foreigners continue to struggle with the German language. You Den Let Turn is a tribute to both of these struggles, and the final word on the Antiqua-Fraktur-Streit.
Side by side comparison of Bormann's text from 1941, and adapted text for non-German speakers, 2014
Photographic documentation of Fraktur signs in Germany - A to E
A rare Fraktur sign found in the wild, Wittenberge, 2016
