Elizabeth Friedländer

Elizabeth Friedländer also Elisabeth, Betty Friedlander (born October 10, 1903 in Berlin ; died 1984 in Kinsale / Cork ) was a German-English typographer, calligrapher and designer.

Life

Elisabeth Friedländer came from a wealthy Jewish family. She studied calligraphy and typography at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin with Emil Rudolf Weiß . In the 1920s she worked for the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin. She mainly designed titles for Die Dame magazine , where she was responsible for the headlines and layouts. Her work has been published in specialist magazines such as Used Graphics .

In 1933/34 she was one of the few women who designed the successful Friedländer typeface for the Bauersche foundry in Frankfurt am Main , which was cast in 1938. A little later, at the instigation of the National Socialists, it was renamed Elisabeth because of the Jewish name . In the course of the " Aryanization " in the publishing industry, Elisabeth Friedländer lost her job at Ullstein in 1933 and emigrated to Italy in 1936 , where she worked for Mondadori and Editoriale Domus in Milan . After she was exposed to repression in Italy as a Jew, she left the country.

In 1939 she moved to London with the aim of emigrating to the USA . There she initially worked as a maid; after the outbreak of war finally prevented her from continuing her journey, she took English citizenship and anglicized her name. She worked in an advertising agency and participated in the Black Propaganda Unit in the resistance against Nazi Germany by producing forged German printed matter. After the war she worked successfully as a book designer and graphic artist, among others for the publishing house Penguin Books , whose famous penguin logo comes from her. In 1951, she turned down the offer to return to Germany. In 1952 she designed vignettes and decorative strips for the Linotype Corporation and border decorations (The Friedlander borders) for Monotype.

Together with her partner, she moved to Kinsale / Cork in 1961, where she continued to work as a calligrapher and designer, but also ran a souvenir shop with her own products. Her font Elisabeth is still used, for example in private presses such as the Fischbachpresse . Due to the digitization by Andreu Balius in 2005, it can also be used in the DTP area.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Commercial graphics, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 56 ff
2. ^ Judith Claudia Joos, Trustees for the public ?, British book publishers at the time of the Second World War, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008, p. 179
3. ↑ General artist lexicon
4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Elizabeth Type  

Literature (selection)

• Pauline Paukers, New borders, The Working Life of Elizabeth Friedlander , Oldham 1998.
• E. Fischer, Buchgestaltung im Exil 1933-1950 (Frankfurt am Main), Wb. 2003. - Online: 2004.
• Judith Claudia Joos, Trustees for the public ?, British book publishers at the time of World War II , Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008.
• Gerda Breuer , Julia Meer (Ed.): Women in Graphic Design. Jovis / Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86859-153-8 , p. 448.
• Pauline Paucker: Two Typographers-Calligraphers: Berthold Wolpe and Elizabeth Friedlander , in: No complaint about England? German and Austrian exile experiences in Great Britain 1933–1945, ed. by Charmian Brinson , Richard Dove, Anthony Grenville, Marian Malet and Jennifer Taylor. iudicium Verlag, Munich 1998 (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study, Vol. 72), pp. 200-214