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99% Invisible

Fraktur

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Arts, Design

4.828.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The long and strange history of fraktur and its somewhat ironic designation as the "Nazi font"

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is 99% invisible.

0:02.1

I'm Roman Mars.

0:05.1

Early one Monday this past December,

0:07.4

Peter Dorful started his week the way most of us do.

0:10.8

Which is the say, reluctantly.

0:13.0

So it was a normal Monday morning, I was gonna go to work,

0:18.0

and I've only been awake for like half an hour or something,

0:20.0

so I would still live, well, a bit woozy. Peter lives in Dresden, Germany. or something

0:22.8

Woozy.

0:23.0

Peter lives in Dresden, Germany, where he works in elder care,

0:26.4

visiting clients at their homes.

0:28.0

And to do that, he usually takes the bus.

0:31.0

But that morning, he noticed something unusual as he boarded.

0:34.4

When I got on the bus I see that the bus driver had put up a sign inside of the bus that

0:41.4

said in German,

0:43.0

these busstoyote is a ducherfala,

0:47.0

which means this bus is driven by a German driver.

0:52.0

A homemade sign saying this bus is driven by a German driver was not the

0:57.1

kind of thing Peter was used to seeing on his daily commute. That's reporter Kevin Caners.

1:01.5

If it's Peter, the driver's message was pretty clear.

1:05.7

I can only interpret what the person who put up the sign would have said.

1:10.2

But the implication to me was, this is a good bus, you do not have to worry, you can talk to me in German

...

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