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SPEAKER_05: So I was still a bit woozy. Peter lives in Dresden, Germany, where he works in elder care, visiting clients at their homes.
SPEAKER_07: And to do that, he usually takes the bus. But that morning, he noticed something unusual as he boarded.
SPEAKER_05: When I get on the bus, I see that the bus driver had put up a sign inside of the bus that said in German, Die sind buss steute ein Deutscher Farra, which means this bus is driven by a German driver.
SPEAKER_09: A homemade sign saying this bus is driven by a German driver was not the kind of thing Peter was used to seeing on his daily commute. That's reporter Kevin Kainers.
SPEAKER_07: But Peter, the driver's message was pretty clear.
SPEAKER_05: I can only interpret what the person who put up the sign would have said. But the implication to me was, this is a good bus. You do not have to worry. You can talk to me in German because I am one of the good ones and not a foreigner.
SPEAKER_07: But what really drove the message of this sign home was not just the words, but the typeface they were printed in.
SPEAKER_09: A typeface from a larger family of typefaces once used throughout Germany and commonly referred to as Fraktur. And which in English goes by a different name, Blackletter.
SPEAKER_09: Blackletter is the type of old-timey gothic typeface that you often see used for the bold front titles of newspapers, like the New York Times or Washington Post. You might also see it on tattoos or the t-shirts of heavy metal bands. Put it on a page and it brings to mind the time of castles, knights, and feathered quills. But for many people, especially in Europe, Blackletter is most closely associated with one thing.
SPEAKER_07: It's the Nazi font. You know, I'm not that good with history and stuff.
SPEAKER_05: But what I know is that the font that was used by Nazi Germany really, really looks the same way as this. October 1938. Adolf Hitler made his triumphant entrance into Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.
SPEAKER_00: Just days earlier, the world was at the brink of war and France and Great Britain reluctantly signed on to the Munich Pact.
SPEAKER_07: If you've ever caught even one minute of the History Channel or really any documentary about World War II, you have seen this typeface on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi roadwork signs, usually saying something like, Verboten with a big exclamation mark. Today in Germany, Blackletter typefaces are frequently used by neo-Nazi groups.
SPEAKER_09: And for many Germans, they bring to mind the dark times of the country's fascist past. Which is why it was pretty clear to Peter and the other passengers on the bus what was going on with this bus driver's sign.
SPEAKER_07: The message by itself is not welcoming and has this nationalist tone.
SPEAKER_03: But the font choice adds to that. Florian Hardwick is a graphic designer in Berlin and the editor of a website called Fonts & Use.
SPEAKER_09: And he says that in Germany, when it's not being used on a band tee or masthead, Blackletter has a very specific set of connotations. The Blackletter typefaces as a genre have been associated with German nationalism for a long time.
SPEAKER_03: And everybody who sees them today knows that it's not a standard choice. It sends a signal emphasizing the Germaness.
SPEAKER_05: Even if it was like in a neutral font, it would still have been a problematic thing. But it's kind of like the cherry on top. The one thing that really drives the point home.
SPEAKER_07: The sign that Peter saw that day would end up causing a big stir in Germany. And get folded into an ongoing debate surrounding racism, nationalism, and culture. A debate in which the use of Blackletter often serves as a kind of symbolic dividing line. Today, depending on one's perspective, Blackletter can either represent German culture's rich and proud heritage,
SPEAKER_09: or alternatively, symbolize everything that's wrong with it. But to understand how people's feelings about a simple typeface got to this point, we need to go back to the moment of its birth. Because once upon a time, in that bygone era of knights and castles and feather quills,
SPEAKER_07: Blackletter wasn't limited to Germany. It wasn't even Germanic. Instead, it was used all across Europe. Blackletter may seem incredibly ornate, like it was created for the sole purpose of turning letter forms into little individual flourishes of art.
SPEAKER_09: It definitely does not seem like a common means of communication. But back in the Middle Ages, Blackletter, with its angular forms, was actually considered practical.
SPEAKER_07: Especially for monastic scribes copying out entire books by hand.
SPEAKER_08: Blackletter initially developed in the Middle Ages because forms that had these kinds of angles were easier to write more rhythmically and correctly than rounded forms.
SPEAKER_09: Dan Reynolds is an American type designer and historian who has been living in Germany for the last two decades. And he says that today, we're used to typefaces with perfectly rounded curves. Think of our Os, Us, Ps, and Cs. But while these shapes look easy enough to draw, if you're using a quill to draw out thousands of them, page after page, they're not. And then, just as now, readers valued standardization in the text.
SPEAKER_07: Every letter, even the rounded ones, had to look exactly the same. But it was hard for a monk copying out a long text to draw consistently perfect circles. So Blackletter writing styles probably arose so that the products would be more even in their appearance and probably also faster to produce.
SPEAKER_08: If you were a scribe, it was a lot easier to produce all those Os and Us and Cs out of a series of short, straight lines.
SPEAKER_07: The technique of using straight lines instead of perfectly rounded curves gave the letters a fragmented appearance.
SPEAKER_09: Which is actually how Germany's most common form of blackletter type would get its name, fractur. That's the Latin term for broken, because the letter forms have these broken angle curves.
SPEAKER_09: Blackletter was first developed in France in the 12th century. But within a few hundred years, it had become standard throughout Europe. It wasn't even really a stylistic choice. It was just what words looked like. It went unquestioned. That was what people thought of when they thought of writing, when they thought of a text.
SPEAKER_09: Susan Reid is head of Germanic studies at the British Library. And she says that blackletter became so ingrained in the culture that even after it stopped being needed, people kept using it. And so when the printing press was introduced, most of the early typefaces were some variety of blackletter typeface.
SPEAKER_04: As with so many big leaps in technology, the printing press started off by borrowing heavily on the design conventions that came before it,
SPEAKER_07: even though the new operating principles made those conventions unnecessary. Even Gutenberg, the man who developed the first popular printing presses, was no exception.
SPEAKER_09: He went for a textura, a narrow, very angular blackletter typeface that was also used by scribes at that time. At first, the printing press appeared to only further cement blackletter status as Europe's dominant form of writing.
SPEAKER_07: But soon it would be challenged by a very different kind of typeface. Roman. Kind of rolls off the tongue. And trust me, you've definitely seen Roman type before, too.
SPEAKER_09: It's the style of letter that's associated with imperial Rome.
SPEAKER_08: But just like the letters chiseled onto the side of an ancient marble column, Roman letters are sparer and more vertical than their blackletter counterparts.
SPEAKER_07: You'd also probably find them a lot easier to read. And there's a reason for that. The letters are instantly recognizable because they look like the letters that we've been reading our entire lives.
SPEAKER_08: Today, almost all major Western typefaces are Roman, from Times New Roman to Arial.
SPEAKER_09: Every time you open up Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you're using Roman type. It's our era's blackletter. It's just what writing looks like. Yes, I mean, it's a strange thing. People sort of ask, you know, why, why fracta became the default typeface in Germany.
SPEAKER_04: And I always almost want to flip the question on its head and say, why did Roman become the default everywhere else when most printing started in blackletter type?
SPEAKER_07: Roman script might have stayed lost to history, but right around the same time Gutenberg was printing blackletter Bibles in Germany, something else was happening in Italy. Renaissance scholars were rediscovering ancient Roman texts.
SPEAKER_08: You had this rediscovery in the Renaissance of classical literature in the classical world, and classical letter forms were being brought back.
SPEAKER_09: Committed to bringing back the culture and wisdom of antiquity, Italian scholars began consciously developing their own Roman-style letters, which drew heavily on the classical forms they encountered.
SPEAKER_04: And so when they started printing classical texts, then they started using those as well.
SPEAKER_09: At first, Roman type was used strictly for texts written in Latin, the language of antiquity and the church. But pretty quickly, and for reasons that remain a little hazy, Roman type broke out of its Latin cage and kind of took over.
SPEAKER_07: By the end of the 16th century, Roman type had become common in the written vernacular languages of France and Spain. England followed suit in the 17th century, the Netherlands and Sweden in the 18th. It had become the very same thing that blackletter had been before, ubiquitous and unquestioned.
SPEAKER_07: But even as Roman became the Western world's dominant form of writing, Germany and the German language stayed resolutely committed to blackletter, an island of broken script in a sea of curves.
SPEAKER_09: And it's mostly thanks to the best-selling author in the history of the German language, Martin Luther.
SPEAKER_02: The Adventures of Martin Luther!
SPEAKER_09: Luther and the Protestant Reformation he set in motion in Germany threw everything that had to do with Rome and the Catholic Church into doubt. The Protestant reformer whose reassessment of the role of the individual in Christian belief shook the foundations of a post-fueled Germany in the grip of the 16th century.
SPEAKER_02: And in the process, he gave German as a written language a big boost.
SPEAKER_08: Luther, by writing so much and trying to write to a broad as possible audience, really codified a lot of what written German was.
SPEAKER_09: Luther and other German Protestants were especially keen to distinguish German writing from the writing of Catholic Italy, which they saw as corrupt, even evil. And that included the Church's favorite typeface. So there was an explicit casting of Roman type as being associated with the Pope and with Catholicism and things that were not German.
SPEAKER_08: And this was, at least by the time Luther is getting to his Bible editions, this is an explicit wish that they be set in German type and not in Roman type.
SPEAKER_07: But there was one German typeface in particular, which would end up being used more than any other. Fraktur.
SPEAKER_09: Fraktur came to be seen as uniquely German, almost as if it were imbued with special Germanic values. So much so that people would eventually refer to all German black letter typefaces as Fraktur.
SPEAKER_07: This association of Fraktur with all things good and Roman with all things bad became so strong that in some of Luther's German Bible editions, unpleasant words like wrath and devil and punishment were set in a Roman typeface to distinguish it from the rest of the text, which stayed in Fraktur.
SPEAKER_09: Later German texts would go even further, applying the rule if even part of a word was borrowed from another language.
SPEAKER_04: And you actually get these rather wonderful things that where there's a foreign loan word that has, say, a Latin stem and a German suffix, the Latin stem within the same word will be printed in Roman letters, and then the ending in Fraktur.
SPEAKER_08: So this is a clear break, typographically, on the page from Rome. And just as there wasn't going to be a reconciliation between Germany and Italy, there wasn't going to be a typographic reconciliation either. At first, black letter remained popular in many parts of Protestant Europe, but one by one, the other Protestant countries began to give in to the temptations of Roman type,
SPEAKER_07: until finally, Germany was the lone holdout.
SPEAKER_09: In part because, unlike the people in those other Protestant countries, Germany remained a fragmented jumble of smaller states until the late 1800s. So Fraktur came to be seen as one of the things holding German national identity together, especially in the 19th century, when the country was invaded by Napoleon. The occupying French had their Roman letters, and the Germans had Fraktur.
SPEAKER_07: Germany, as a nation without nationhood, as a collection of small, quite fragmented states, needed these other symbols of national identity.
SPEAKER_04: And I think this is when Fraktur particularly becomes associated with Germany and the German language and German culture.
SPEAKER_09: Many came to believe that where there was no Fraktur, there was no Germany, including the mother of Germany's greatest writer. Goethe's mother, she actually described Roman letters as fatal, as if they're almost sort of painful for her to read.
SPEAKER_04: And I think that's something that's often quoted as evidence of this naturalness of Fraktur, of Germany's greatest writer's mother, approved of it. In 1871, when Germany finally unified, Fraktur became the official government typeface.
SPEAKER_09: And Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor, was such a staunch supporter that he said he would refuse to read any German book not set in German type. But right around the time they finally got their own country, a growing contingent of Germans began to wonder if they really needed their own typeface.
SPEAKER_07: Liberal, cosmopolitan, and future-facing, these Germans came to feel it was silly to keep using letter forms from the Middle Ages.
SPEAKER_09: They began pushing for Germany to drop its beloved Fraktur and move to Roman type. There were people sort of in the spirit of progress and modernism who thought that this is crazy.
SPEAKER_08: We should be a more international country. We're connected with our neighbors. We have business ties and cultural ties. Increasingly, academic and scientific papers intended for foreign distribution were being printed in Roman type.
SPEAKER_09: And as the world became more international, Roman type also started seeping in. It began to be taught in schools alongside Fraktur. And by 1891, about 40% of German books were being printed in Roman. But more conservative Germans pushed back. They insisted that Blackletter was and should remain a cultural staple.
SPEAKER_09: In 1911, the German Reichstag actually held a vote on whether the country should switch over by having Roman replace Fraktur as the official typeface in German schools and government offices. But after a fierce debate, the legislation didn't pass. German typography had reached a stalemate with neither side willing to budge.
SPEAKER_07: Even by the end of the 1920s, in the era of telephones, radios, refrigerators and jazz, traditional Fraktur street signs could be seen hanging next to Art Deco posters featuring sans serif Roman fonts.
SPEAKER_03: It was a dual thing. If you look at photographs from the cityscape in the 1880s or 1890s, you would see both other forms and maybe even more in Roman type. Because that was the style associated with commerce and advertising.
SPEAKER_09: It was as though there were two separate typographical realities representing two different Germanies.
SPEAKER_07: Fraktur would end up losing the struggle for Germany's soul. But it wasn't the liberal, freedom-loving, over-educated cosmopolitans who finally broke the impasse. Instead, it was the most ardent German nationalist of all time. The responsibility lies on the shoulders of one man. By his latest act of naked aggression, Hitler has committed a crime against the whole human race.
SPEAKER_02: In 1933, the Nazi party rose to power on a wave of German chauvinism.
SPEAKER_09: And at first, this seemed like great news for those in favor of traditional black letter typefaces. He has rejected every appeal for a peaceful settlement.
SPEAKER_02: All have been rebuffed by the leader of the German Nazis in his senseless criminal greed for power. Fraktur was in. Roman was out.
SPEAKER_09: There was a lot of push from certain areas within the government and within the party to use the moment in 1933 to ram this change through.
SPEAKER_08: To get rid of Roman type and really make everything be black letter.
SPEAKER_09: Directives were given in the interior ministry. That said, from now on, they would use black letter typewriters for everything. Many publishers changed over and the proportion of books and newspapers printed in Fraktur type grew substantially. And you see placards that tell Germans to be German, to think German, to even be German in their writing.
SPEAKER_08: And of course, these are in Fraktur. There was just one problem. Adolf Hitler kind of hated Fraktur.
SPEAKER_07: In 1934, he actually made a speech in which he criticized the obsession with outward trappings of Germanness, among which he included Gothic writing.
SPEAKER_04: This Gothic romanticism, Hitler says, is ill-suited to our age of iron, glass, and steel.
SPEAKER_09: It wasn't that Hitler wasn't into traditional German values. He just didn't think that should mean that Hitler was into German values.
SPEAKER_07: He just didn't think that should mean being old-fashioned. It's hard to have everyone living in the mountains on farms with their cows and their sheep and their goats, and also working in factories to build high-tech airplanes and rockets.
SPEAKER_08: And when the Olympics came to Berlin in 1936, he insisted that a lot of the publicity and the posters and for that should be in Roman rather than Fraktur type, because you were bringing the world to see the new Germany.
SPEAKER_04: Besides, Hitler thought his fascist values shouldn't just apply to Germans. The Third Reich was supposed to span the globe.
SPEAKER_04: Hitler actually said that German was becoming the world language, and within a hundred years, everybody would be speaking German.
SPEAKER_07: But even Hitler's delusions of grandeur had their limits. He knew that if he wanted to rule over the world, he would have to use a typeface that the rest of the world could actually read.
SPEAKER_09: And so, in 1941, an edict was circulated to all publishers and printers on behalf of the Führer himself, decreeing that Roman type become the standard type throughout Germany. Effective immediately, neither Fraktur nor its cursive counterparts were to be taught in schools, used in government documents, or appear on street signs.
SPEAKER_07: All magazines and newspapers were likewise expected to change over to the Roman script.
SPEAKER_04: Which was quite an extraordinary thing to do in the middle of a world war, because it's very expensive to just suddenly go over from one typeface to another universally. And the explanation in the letter is that, you know, shock, horror, they had found out that a black letter was actually a Jewish invention, and that it had to be dropped immediately.
SPEAKER_08: This wasn't true, but it was an unassailable argument. It was impossible to come back from that. Fraktur didn't vanish everywhere overnight, but with the edict, it quickly fell out of use. And it would never fully recover.
SPEAKER_09: The Nazis brought an end to Black Letter's 800 year run as a common form of writing. So it's ironic that the typeface Hitler banned and personally disliked remained stubbornly associated with him.
SPEAKER_07: Perhaps it's because the Nazis promoted Fraktur so heavily before changing course. But it's also just because they were German nationalists, and it was a traditional German typeface.
SPEAKER_09: Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that they found it hard to take the connection. Especially telling was the edict itself, the one banning Fraktur. Although the memorandum was typed in a Roman font, the Nazi letterhead at the top was printed in Black Letter.
SPEAKER_09: By 1945, when Germany was finally defeated, no one wanted anything to do with the quote unquote Nazi font. And by the 1950s, it had pretty much died out. I think I saw some statistic that between 1951 and 1979, there was something like 34 books published in Fraktur in that whole period. So that's quite astonishing.
SPEAKER_04: Whether or not it's okay to use Black Letter today is a complicated question, especially in Germany. It depends on the context, and it doesn't always make sense.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Fraktur on a restaurant sign or on a beer label is invisible. And you can find Black Letter mastheads in newspapers like New York Times, because that's normal. That's what we're used to.
SPEAKER_09: Consumer items and commercial ventures that want to evoke a more innocent sense of tradition and quality often use Black Letter without any trouble. The same goes for heavy metal bands and other people that want to play up its medieval or gothic qualities.
SPEAKER_07: But there are also contexts where its use is not innocent and can't be forgiven as naive.
SPEAKER_09: When Peter Durfel, the bus rider in Dresden, saw that sign, the one that said, this bus is driven by a German driver, it was printed in Black Letter, and Peter knew exactly what it was meant to communicate. Like if I were a person that was potentially targeted by potential Nazis, I would definitely take the next bus.
SPEAKER_09: In fact, the side of the sign and of the font was so alarming that there was no way he could just let it go. So I was thinking to myself, what should I do? Should I talk to the guy? I didn't know what to do. But then I thought, wait, this is an official public bus. I don't think that's even legal.
SPEAKER_05: When Peter got off the bus, he took a picture of the homemade sign on his phone and tweeted it at the Dresden Public Transit Authority, asking essentially, what the hell is this?
SPEAKER_09: And they responded like really quickly, half an hour later, and they were like, yeah, somebody already told us that. We don't know how that could happen.
SPEAKER_05: We already took the sign down and the bus driver will not be driving today anymore. So I was like, all right, thanks for the quick answer. Good thing. And I thought that was it.
SPEAKER_07: But a little later, a journalist messaged Peter on Twitter. And it's like, hey, I'm with the press. Do you want to do an interview? And I'm like, OK, sure.
SPEAKER_05: And from there on, it just kind of spiraled.
SPEAKER_09: The story appeared on the local news, then on the national news. When the driver was let go, some German nationalists wrote tweets in the driver's defense. Then some right-wing politicians retreated it. Then I got some hate mail.
SPEAKER_07: In the end, it took a couple of weeks for everything to die down, although that doesn't mean the larger issues swirling around Fraktur are anywhere near resolved.
SPEAKER_09: Alt-right nationalism remains on the rise in Germany, and especially since the refugee crisis, controversy surrounding the use of the typeface seemed to be happening with more frequency. No mainstream conservative politician publicly uses Fraktur. But in 2017, a police anti-terror unit in the state of Saxony was sanctioned for using a logo on the interior of one of their specialized vehicles that featured a black-letter font.
SPEAKER_07: Mostly, though, the only people openly using Fraktur are neo-Nazi groups promoting their hyper-traditional version of German nationalism. Apparently, most of them still don't realize that Hitler considered their favorite typeface hopelessly tacky and provincial.
SPEAKER_09: And many nationalists don't even understand which typeface it is they're using. Dresden bus driver, for example, may have thought his sign was in Fraktur, but it was actually in Old English, a black-letter typeface that has no historical connection to Germany.
SPEAKER_07: Of course, if Peter's story about the bus driver and his black-letter sign demonstrates anything, it's that no matter what the real historical facts are, Fraktur will never return to the mainstream. For better or worse, it's going to keep on being the Nazi font.
SPEAKER_03: This long tradition of centuries of use is kind of forgotten, and all we can see now are these 12 years of the Nazis. And, yeah, you can't change that. It has happened, and that's the way it is, and it won't come back. But even if they don't think it should return to everyday use, those who study Fraktur don't want to see it completely forgotten either.
SPEAKER_07: And perhaps no one more so than Hanno Blom.
SPEAKER_06: So my name is Kennenzi Hanno Blom, Hanno Wilhelm Blom.
SPEAKER_09: Hanno is a 76-year-old retired teacher and is the president of the Association for German Script and Language, which is dedicated to preserving and improving people's knowledge of Fraktur and other old writing styles. And that's how it all started.
SPEAKER_09: He says that the fact that neo-Nazis use black-letter typefaces only shows that they know nothing about Germany's history. And much of this historical ignorance is for a deeply ironic reason.
SPEAKER_07: Most Germans have trouble reading older German documents precisely because they are in Fraktur. You could probably read something printed in Fraktur, but even then, only with a bit of effort and patience.
SPEAKER_09: And handwritten Fraktur is much more difficult. It's basically illegible for most people today. As a consequence, many of the books and letters and diaries of the past have become harder to connect with. Which is why one of the Association's main activities today, and the one Hanno is most passionate about, is teaching children how to read and write old German cursive.
SPEAKER_09: During our interview, he shows me some correspondence from the 19th century, whose handwriting I can't make head or tails of. And I say, that looks hard. Yes, for me, it's the same thing. Yes, you can learn it. But Hanno, that shows me I've learned fast. Yes, you can learn it. That I'd be amazed at myself. Yes, you can learn it.
SPEAKER_06: You're very strong.
SPEAKER_07: Hanno hopes documents like this one will help people avoid making the mistakes of previous generations. After all, at 76, he is old enough to have lived through the war, when as a small child, his city was destroyed in a bombing raid, and his family had to be evacuated.
SPEAKER_06: We don't know why. How did it come?
SPEAKER_09: So he tells me how important it is that we learn from history. There's no way we can learn from history.
SPEAKER_09: About war and peace, and about how to get along, and about the Germans of the past, like Luther and Goethe, who wrote about all these things, and mostly in fact, tour.
SPEAKER_07: Culture wars and fights about nationalism aren't just for fonts. We have these arguments about buildings, too. We're talking about making federal buildings beautiful again. The second thing I'd like to talk about is the importance of the antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of kajava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kajava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kajava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kajava dot com slash invisible. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. And after this. As we were producing the story of Fraktur and its starring role in this centuries long drama of German nationalism, a contemporary story hit the news that was also at the intersection of design and nationalism. In this case, the story was about the architecture of US federal buildings. On February 4th, 2020, Architectural Record published a story commenting on a draft of an executive order that they got a hold of that called for the White House to adopt federal guidelines to ensure that the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style when it came to new and upgraded federal buildings. The order was authored by a group called the National Civic Art Society, and it was titled, making federal buildings beautiful again, in case you weren't all confused as to the audience that this particular order was pandering to. Our friend, the architecture critic and celebrated McMansion skeptic Kate Wagner wrote a column in the New Republic about it and I called her up to talk about it. The first thing I did was ask her what the authors of this order mean when they say that all federal buildings should be in the classical architectural style.
SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of funny, their idea of what classicism is, is basically just anything inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, but also like 19th century Victorian kitsch is fine too, because they included the Eisenhower building, which is this ridiculous second empire building with like a million columns, and I hate it so much and it's so ugly, but they're like, this is great architecture. Well, for the record, I kind of like the Eisenhower building. It's pretty fussy and very French, but the point is that when people extol the greatness of classical architecture, they're basically talking about columns.
SPEAKER_07: Yep, they're basically talking about columns.
SPEAKER_07: This broad advocacy for classical architecture is in opposition to more modernist or brutalist styles. They believe that modernism is degenerate and it's ruining everything and people hate it and we need to free people from modernism because it's not the architecture of the people or whatever, which is of course ridiculous. How many people go to see Fallingwater literally every year? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: So this proposed order is a 180 degree reversal to a seminal document written in 1962 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan called Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture that explicitly stated, quote, design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa.
SPEAKER_01: So there was basically a mandate in that document that said an official architectural style must be avoided and that federal buildings and that new buildings should be exemplary of the time in which they are built, the opposite in spirit to the proposed executive order.
SPEAKER_07: The architecture community reacted very strongly to this proposal and I should stress here that this is not an official proposal from the White House. It's a draft of a proposal that one influential group hopes the White House will adopt, but people have taken it very seriously. The American Institute of Architects released this statement, quote, the AIA strongly opposes uniform style mandates for federal architecture. Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nations, diverse places, thought, culture, and climates. Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy, end quote. Beyond the codification of one federal style, the architecture community objected to one aspect of the order in particular. This order would allow Trump to create a quote President's Committee for the Rebutification of Federal Architecture, which is such a trolly name, and which would enforce this classical design mandate.
SPEAKER_01: And this panel would exclude, quote, artists, architects, engineers, architecture critics, members of the building industry, or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization involved in architecture. So basically anyone who like works in architecture has like anything to do with architecture, like is not allowed to comment on architecture in this panel. So of course, everyone is mad. The AIA is mad. The preservationists are mad. Kate Wagner, the architecture critic is mad. The objection from the architecture community, including yourself, is not an objection to classical architecture, right?
SPEAKER_01: No. Classical architecture is great. Ever since architecture has existed, there have been architectural revivals of past styles. I mean, it is a debate that frames the history of architecture, and the debate is commonly known as the ancients versus the moderns.
SPEAKER_07: And that debate is like a healthy debate. It's a healthy debate. Yeah. It's like- It's part of architecture. It's part of culture. Yeah, exactly. Like when do we look towards the past for architectural ideas, and when do we push forward through various integrations of those ideas together in a sort of eclectic mash, or like furthering like technological progress?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like one of the classic debates of architecture. But the thing is, is that classical buildings are beautiful, obviously. And it's important that architects be trained in classicism. And it's important that a lot of architects go on to study classicism and to practice building classical buildings, because we always need people to, for example, like make additions to historical buildings, make restorations to historical buildings, to lecture on historical buildings, to work across other fields, including anthropology and archaeology, to talk about how historical buildings may have been in the past. I mean, it's a really central and important part of architecture. That being said, time always moves forward. And architecture historically and today has always been a conversation between past and present, not a dogmatic argument between past and present, though that has happened. That's what preservation is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be like making a mothballed museum of every building. It's how do we reconcile historical architecture with contemporary needs, with contemporary economics, with contemporary politics? That's what preservation does. And modernism is included in that. The problem is not classical architecture. The problem is that there's a certain type of chud online who thinks that classical architecture is proof that Western society is better than other societies and that we had a beautiful Western society that was infallible, but crumbled under globalization or immigration or whatever right wing, like, crypto-fascist element you think ruined columns.
SPEAKER_07: The one and only Kate Wagner. You can find her writing at The New Republic and McMansionHell.com. If you want to hear more from her, she's the star of episode number 232 of 99 P.I. It's called McMansion Hell. It's one of my favorites. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kevin Caners, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousuf, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Truffleman, Chris Berube, Vivian Lay, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But you can come yell at us about fonts and neoclassical architecture at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_07: Radio-Topia from PRX.
