I’m watching a short Youtube video of an episode of Die Deutsche Wochenschau from June 1944 describing German reaction to the D-Day invasion (basically, we’ve got it covered, folks!)
Shown in the videos are Germans reading newspapers of the day and it’s all in that Gothic black-letter print which even if I could read German I wouldn’t be able to make out. Do modern Germans still use this print and if not can they still understand it?
My German isn’t all that good, but I can read Gothic script just fine. And yes, it’s still in occasional use in Germany and other European countries (less in Germany than in other countries, IME), as an Olde Style Thinge.
It’s just a font style, not a different alphabet.
But it’s not just a font. It’s a hard-to-read font. (unless you’re used to it, I suppose).
I can read a little German, in a proper font.
But look at that newspaper (33 seconds). “Night Edition” is easy. But gott in himmel, what is that last sentence? Is that a “C”? Is that last word “Oange”? “Gange”? And that first letter in “American” - is that “2l”? 
Any reasonably literate German can read Gothic print; there are virtually no long text published that way but a lot of promotional lettering meant to evoke old times (19th century or before). One deficiency in that respect is that a lot of people don’t recognize the medial (long) s anymore, confusing it for the letter f, and logo/graphic designers accomodate that by incorrectly using the terminal s where a medial s would be called for - a crime against typography.
Old German handwriting (Kurrent) is quite another thing - it’s mostly historians who learn to read it. The individual letters are still used in mathematic notation, though - at university we did vector analysis with Latin script for scalars and Kurrent for vectors. We did not do any joined up writing in Kurrent, though.
Here’s a copy-paste from Fraktur - Wikipedia
������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������
������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������ ������
Yeah, it might technically still be the same alphabet, but it’s different enough that I wouldn’t expect someone to be able to read it.
Of course, the people reading German newspapers in the 1940s were used to it.
It’s a “G.” “Erbitterte Kämpfe im Gange” = “Bitter struggle in progress.”
While it’s a very busy font, it’s entirely readable if you know it.
Right. I’ve tried to translate German letters from the 1800s and it’s virtually impossible.
Heck of a video. Thanks for the link.
I can’t see that at all. It just looks like a bunch of question marks. To be fair, I’m on a phone though, and my browser probably just can’t register that font.
Even to try to read Sütterlin is difficult enough, especially when it’s as a foreign language.
Neither does my desktop Chrome.
I can’t even read English in italics. I can, but only with a magnifying glass, because in standard book typeface, the letters bleed together. * “rmnu” looks exactly like “mnru”* which looks exactly like “unrm”, and its usually unfamiliar foreign words that are italicized. I hate it when an author writes entire paragraphs in italics, and I’ve seen a few where a whole chapter is in italics. I just take those back to the library and throw them back into the book return bin.
I don’t know if that accommodation is “incorrect” really. The medial ‘s’ used to be common in Roman typefaces as well, and as you know, that faded out a long time ago. They even change the long s’s to regular s’s in new editions of old texts, and so on.
Ditto for my desktop Firefox. I’m clearly lacking the necessary font.
My grandfather’s aunt used to teach German in the days before the War*, and I have some of her old teaching texts. They show very clearly how to write the German alphabet in the old script (which was current at the time), and how they related to our alphabet. It rather reminded me of a lesson in hiragana/katakana.
*Not sure which War - definitely WW2 but given that Grandpa was born in 1913 she could have been teaching it before WW1.
Pleonast’s software damaged the characters in the copy-paste process somehow.
This should work:
𝕬 𝕭 𝕮 𝕯 𝕰 𝕱 𝕲 𝕳 𝕴 𝕵 𝕶 𝕷 𝕸 𝕹 𝕺 𝕻 𝕼 𝕽 𝕾 𝕿 𝖀 𝖁 𝖂 𝖃 𝖄 𝖅
𝖆 𝖇 𝖈 𝖉 𝖊 𝖋 𝖌 𝖍 𝖎 𝖏 𝖐 𝖑 𝖒 𝖓 𝖔 𝖕 𝖖 𝖗 𝖘 𝖙 𝖚 𝖛 𝖜 𝖝 𝖞 𝖟How many English speakers can read so-called Old English fonts?
For me, it’s certainly not comfortable or easy to read any sustained passage, but if I really need to I can piece it out, and I’d think German black-letter text would be about the same.
Thank you, Derleth, that works fine for me.
I find those quite easily recognizable. It’s hard for a non-German speaker to compare them with the German fonts because the German seems to use a lot of diphthongs and characters not in the English alphabet, though I could be wrong there.
One of the books we read in my third-year German class (high school) was printed entirely in Fraktur. That was 45 years ago, but I still have no problems reading it. 
(Understanding it, though…)
The difference is that the horizontal line on the f extends to both sides of the vertical, while on the s it only sticks out to the left.
All I can think of is the three umlauts (a, o, and u, both upper and lower case) and the sz ligature.