«Confrontation of fonts: Gothic vs Antiqua» in the language politics of the Third Reich

The article is devoted to the consideration of the script in the modern history of the German literary language, associated with the design of its normative graphics (graphemics), in particular the «font dispute: antiqua vs gothic» in the first half of the 20th century. For a significant period of historical development, the German literary language is marked by «cognitive dissonance» caused in the linguistic consciousness of its speakers by the collision of «conflicting» variants of Latin characters. The parallel use of various graphic variants of writing (diglyph), especially at the stage of the modern history of the German language, is marked by the influence of various extra-linguistic factors (ideology, confessional, cultural differences, national and state policies, etc.). A pressing issue is the consideration of the radical and controversial language policy in the totalitarian Third Reich in 1933–1945. Declaring Fraktur as a «national script», a symbol of identity and the embodiment of basic doctrines (unity of the nation and German-speaking ethnic groups, anti-Semitism, «struggle for culture», the idea of superiority), the National Socialists in 1941, at the stage of reorienting their policy towards «Eurocentrism», declared it replacement of the previously rejected antiqua as «normative German writing». The article provides a critical stage-by-stage analysis of the scenarios of the language policy of National Socialism in the «dispute about graphics», attempts to use a «compromise font» (Futura). Ideologemes associated with this practice are analyzed as lexical markers (Sprachregelung, Kulturkampf, Schrifttum, Judenlettern, deutsche Volksschrift/Normalschrift, etc.). The result of the study was the construction of a model of «font strategy» as a special linguistic-semiotic phenomenon of the language policy of the Third Reich. The conclusions note a peculiar reflection of the «font dispute» in different types of texts of 1933–1945 and in the military discourse of the Third Reich.