U u — the Sütterlin letter U

History

The letter U is the 21st letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a back close rounded vowel, realized as long /uː/ in 'gut' and short /ʊ/ in 'Mutter'. In 1911, the graphic artist and typographer Ludwig Sütterlin was commissioned by the Prussian Ministry of Culture to develop a modernized handwriting script for primary education, creating what became known as Sütterlinschrift.

Sütterlin strictly preserved the U-Bogen: lowercase u consists of two upright rounded downstrokes, with a small curved crescent drawn above the letter. Capital U is an upright rounded basin occupying the upper two zones. Unlike historical Kurrent, which slanted sharply and featured narrow pointed angles (Spitzschrift), Sütterlin mandated an upright posture (Steilschrift) and round curves. It was designed specifically to be written with a monoline steel round nib (Kugelspitzfeder), avoiding difficult variations between thick downstrokes and hair-thin upstrokes.

The U-Bogen is perhaps the single most famous feature of German handwriting. Because e, n, and u share similar vertical strokes, spotting the floating crescent above u immediately allows the reader to anchor surrounding letters in seventeenth- to twentieth-century manuscripts. Sütterlin was introduced into Prussian schools in 1915 and spread throughout Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Because it was taught exclusively from 1915 until the 1941 Bormann decree abolished all German scripts, documents written in Sütterlin can reliably be dated to a narrow historical window between the First World War and the mid-twentieth century.

For family historians and genealogists examining early twentieth-century German letters, diaries, postcards, and school exercise books, identifying the regular, upright letterforms of Sütterlin U provides an immediate benchmark for dating and transcribing the text.