I wanted to let you know I'm upvoting you, not for the useful links you have provided, but because I also love DIN, to an unreasonable degree, like the kind of feeling that makes someone otherwise totally rational marry a pokemon.
When I was about 20, after the Berlin wall came down, I rode my bike round berlin, then all round east then west Germany for three months, sleeping rough in the forest most of the time, and I think the font, on road signs everywhere, soaked into me as linked to that summer.
But you know what really creeps me about this font. It has a history dating back to the start of the 20th century as letterforms for hand painted signs, but Deutsche Industrienorm 1451 was created in 1936, the year of the of the Berlin Olympics, concentration camps had been open for three years, Triumph of the Will was released the year before. If you've never seen 'Triumph of the Will' it's an experience, I'd never understood how the fascists had managed to appeal to enough people to actually win an election, but in that film you see how they presented themselves to the people of Germany at the time and it was sophisticated. There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense. It seems to me that DIN is part of this carefully crafted propaganda, a tool to help project an vision of Nazi Germany as rational, orderly, scientific, rigorous and correct. And it does the job, like the unemployed labourer, I respond to it exactly the way goebbels would want me to.
I know I can use a Roman road without endorsing the invasion of Gaul, but there's still a horror there millennia later.
> There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense.
That's more or less what I'm trying to say, the little morsel of self esteem given to labourer, the sense of purpose and inclusion, comes tangled up in an insane and horrific ideology, if he wants to eat that morsel he needs to swallow the other part too. So the strategy isn't nonsense, it's nasty, but not nonsense. The human need for inclusion and self esteem is real, responding that need is real, the nonsense is the mythology in which that response is served.
When I was about 20, after the Berlin wall came down, I rode my bike round berlin, then all round east then west Germany for three months, sleeping rough in the forest most of the time, and I think the font, on road signs everywhere, soaked into me as linked to that summer.
But you know what really creeps me about this font. It has a history dating back to the start of the 20th century as letterforms for hand painted signs, but Deutsche Industrienorm 1451 was created in 1936, the year of the of the Berlin Olympics, concentration camps had been open for three years, Triumph of the Will was released the year before. If you've never seen 'Triumph of the Will' it's an experience, I'd never understood how the fascists had managed to appeal to enough people to actually win an election, but in that film you see how they presented themselves to the people of Germany at the time and it was sophisticated. There's a moment in the film in which hilter interacts with an unemployed labourer, and in that interaction he imbues this guy with a sense of purpose, hitler has told him he is a soldier - a soldier with a shovel, it's nonsense, but it is carefully crafted nonsense. It seems to me that DIN is part of this carefully crafted propaganda, a tool to help project an vision of Nazi Germany as rational, orderly, scientific, rigorous and correct. And it does the job, like the unemployed labourer, I respond to it exactly the way goebbels would want me to.
I know I can use a Roman road without endorsing the invasion of Gaul, but there's still a horror there millennia later.