Tannenberg (font)

Station sign Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin from 1936

Excerpt from the Stuttgart Declaration,
Ordinance and News Gazette of the EKD , No. 1 (January 1946)

Sample text in the "Tannenberg bold" font , with some special characters and ligatures

The Tannenberg is a broken grotesque -Schrift. It is a commercial typeface and was developed between 1933 and 1935 by Erich Meyer at the D. Stempel AG type foundry in Frankfurt am Main .

The letter shapes are based on the shapes of the Textura . Like other broken sans serif styles, they were designed in line with the principles of New Typography , which, in line with the spirit of the times, promoted the constructed sans serif fonts in particular (“new objectivity”).

The font was produced in the fonts Tannenberg (1934), Tannenberg half fat (1934), Tannenberg bold (1934), Tannenberg narrow (1933) and Tannenberg light (1935). It is named after the battle of Tannenberg , in which German troops under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff stopped the advance of Russian troops in 1914 .

use

The Tannenberg font soon enjoyed great popularity and was widely used. It was used on official stamps, in book and magazine design, in advertising and in propaganda. From around 1935 to 1941, the Deutsche Reichsbahn used the Tannenberg on station signs . These signs can still be seen today on some stations of the Berlin North-South S-Bahn , which opened in 1936 .

Like all broken fonts, the Tannenberg has hardly been used in official documents since the “ Normalschrift ” of 1941. Nothing changed about that with the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. However, in 1946, among other things, the “ Stuttgart Declaration ” of the EKD was set in the “Ordinance and News Gazette of the Evangelical Church in Germany” in the Tannenberg.

Quote

“Actually, the typical“ German ”fonts in the Nazi sense were not the traditional or the newly created Renaissance Fraktur fonts; rather, they were hard, pseudo-Gothic fonts that had almost nothing to do with Fraktur or Schwabacher formally. They were related to the sensitive textura like the grotesque to the antiqua. The fonts had names like "Tannenberg", "National" , "Gotenburg" and the like. The typesetters ironically called them »high boots grotesque«. "

- Hans Peter Willberg

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marcel Paul Rotter: "Etching pictures, biting words": Continuities and discontinuities in the semiotic structure of text and image motifs in German propaganda posters of the 20th century. University of Wisconsin, Madison 2004, p. 261.
2. ↑ Writings under National Socialism , in Schriftgrad.de
3. ^ Michael Braun: North-South S-Bahn Berlin . GVE, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89218-112-5 , pp. 118 .
4. ^ Broken sans serif fonts , on: website typografie.info
5. ↑ Hans Peter Willberg: The Fraktur and Nationalism. In: The Gazette, May 2001 edition.