History of Sütterlin

Sütterlin is the last widely used form of Kurrent, the older German handwriting.^[1] Kurrent itself grew out of late medieval cursive, and many of its letters picked up variant forms over a long history that ran into the early 20th century.^[2] In 19th-century England it became the fashion to write with the newly developed steel pointed pen.^[3] The steeply slanted English script, with its long ascenders and descenders and a line that swells and thins with pressure, is decorative but technically hard to write.^[4] The pointed pen caught on quickly in Germany as well and set the look of 19th-century handwriting.^[5]

Germans of that time wrote two cursive hands: Kurrent, also called German script, and a Latin cursive.^[6] Place, content and context decided which one to use, and it was normal to switch between the two inside a single sentence.^[7]

Karl Ludwig Sütterlin was born on 23 July 1865 in Lahr in the Black Forest.^[8] He served a lithographer's apprenticeship in Lahr from 1879 to 1884.^[9] He then worked as a lithographer, first in Frankfurt am Main and from 1888 in Berlin.^[10] His poster designs drew wide attention, among them the hammer poster for the 1896 Berlin trade exhibition.^[11] From 1904 to 1917 he taught at the teaching institute of the Royal Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin.^[12]

In 1911, on behalf of the Prussian ministry of culture and schools, he developed a model hand from which children would learn joined-up writing.^[13] The old swelling stroke of quill writing had demanded an unnatural hand position, changing pressure and a great deal of practice, and primary-school pupils often failed at it.^[14] Sütterlin drew instead on the ideas of the script reformer Rudolf von Larisch, whom he admired, and developed a more child-friendly method for beginners.^[15] He had children write with a ball-tipped pen that gave an even line, simplified the letter shapes and shortened the ascenders and descenders.^[16] The writing line was divided in the proportion 1:1:1.^[17] The fairly broad letters were set upright.^[18] Alongside it he developed a Latin model script in a matching style.^[19] That Latin hand, however, is not what the name Sütterlinschrift refers to.^[20] In his own words, his new letters were meant to be nothing more than plain models for first lessons.^[21]

In 1914 the script was put before the Prussian minister of culture and a committee of experts, who found it fit for use.^[22] A decree of 8 July 1915 introduced it in Prussia, at first on a trial basis, and a further decree of 13 June 1918 made it binding for the whole of Prussia.^[23] Thuringia followed in 1929, Hesse in 1930, and Baden and Danzig in 1931.^[24] Sütterlin was named professor at the institute in November 1917, but died suddenly of a stroke on 20 November 1917, aged 52.^[25]

In the 1920s the Sütterlin hand began to replace the form of Kurrent that had been usual until then.^[26] In 1935 a modified form, with a slight slant and fewer round shapes, entered the official curriculum as the Deutsche Volksschrift.^[27] That year it officially became the only German script taught in schools.^[28]

On 3 January 1941 the use of broken printing types, the Fraktur faces, was forbidden.^[29] Sütterlin's script stayed in the schools until the 1941 decree banned the broken scripts.^[30] In place of the broken scripts the Nazi Party put Italian-style lettering such as Antiqua.^[31] Following the Normalschrift decree, a circular of 1 September 1941 forbade the teaching of Kurrent in schools.^[32] From the 1941/42 school year only the so-called Normalschrift remained.^[33] From 1942 schools taught as their model hand a variant of Latin script called Deutsche Normalschrift, with proportions of 2:3:2, a slant and oval forms.^[34]

After 1945 the Nazi regime's Normalschrift decree was no longer in force.^[35] Even so, Latin cursive remained the standard school hand.^[36] In West Germany the Normalschrift was replaced from 1953 by the Lateinische Ausgangsschrift, which the Iserlohn writing circle developed from it, and which in turn went back to Sütterlin's own Latin model script.^[37]

Many German speakers brought up on Sütterlin kept using it well into the postwar period.^[38] In West and East German schools Kurrent was taught only in part, as an extra beside the Latin model hand.^[39] That ended in the 1980s, when the older generations who still wrote Kurrent well, some of them out of habit, had retired from working life.^[40] In German mathematics, until the late 20th century, matrices were written with capital Sütterlin letters and vectors with small ones.^[41]

In everyday German the script is often simply called Sütterlin.^[42] The name is also used loosely for several similar varieties of old German handwriting.^[43]

Check the dates first: Sütterlin's own script was taught in German schools only from 1915 to 1941.^[44] Sütterlin was a modern script based on Kurrent, with simplified letters and vertical strokes, so an older family letter called Sütterlin may in fact be Kurrent.^[45] Expect two forms of small s, the second of which is used at the end of a syllable.^[46] The long s (ſ) survives, along with several standard ligatures.^[47] The shape of ß still hints that it came from ſz.^[48]

The small e is two upright bars set close together, the shape from which the umlaut sign grew.^[49] The umlaut mark over ä, ö and ü has the same shape as that e, so it can look like a tiny e rather than two dots.^[50] A bar over m or n stands for a doubled mm or nn.^[51]

Watch for a change of hand in mid-line: a French word or place name, for instance, would be written in Latin cursive surrounded by Kurrent.^[52] When a page defeats you, there are initiatives and associations in Germany that help people decipher texts in Sütterlin and other Kurrent hands.^[53] Examples include the Sütterlin-Schreibstube in Konstanz and the Sütterlinstube Hamburg.^[54]