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My German teacher, who objected to the German spelling reform of 1906, so tot is todt for me and my daughter laughs at me, mostly let us use Roman letters when we read and always when we wrote because we were uneducable Americans.
English has something similar with that fancy copperplate handwriting people used Back In The Day. I can read it (mostly; the father back you go the harder it gets) and sometimes have friends asking me to get details from old family records etc for them - but I can imagine with something like German it’d be an even more complicated task.
Probably a lot of people can. I know I’m very familiar with it because when I was really young, back in the early 80s, they made super common heavy clear(ish) plastic stencils of exactly that font. I had one at home, some of my kindergarten friends had 'em, and my grandparents kept one in their phone table for us to play with too. It may actually have been a cereal box prize at one point. Oh, it looked just like this, except not pink.
I agree. It is still seen frequently in various places–see, e.g., the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other newspaper logos.
Stencils? Cheater! I could do it by hand, with a dip pen and an ink pot. 
Just kidding, and I agree that stencils do make things easier. Note, though, that I studied and did a lot of calligraphy back in the day, and Gothic Blackletter, and its variants, were hands that I had to learn. Blackletter is actually easy to learn and replicate; it just looks complicated. Once you get the basics down, you can embellish.
No problem - but then, I used to make part of my living as a calligrapher (back before computer fonts put most of us out of business) so I used to write in it as well.
I can basically read the “old English” font. The main issue is that u and v look the same, and Y looks nothing like a Y. Context would probably make it clear. It just would take a bit longer to read.
But that’s because they look like the “normal” letters. The German font has a lot more letters that don’t look normal: HIKPVWYZkyz. I also don’t see a long S, which I’m not sure how many Germans can read. Older ones, sure. But younger ones?
Briten und Amerikanen auf Befehl
Moskaus im Westen Gelandet
Erbitterte kämpfe im Gange
Keine probleme, mein Herr.
The medial s, plus the ligatures used in Fraktur, are a help to reading, though - people being used to reading Fraktur can read faster with them.
Two examples that don’t read well in Latin script - but Unicode does not appear to have a code point for Fraktur long s
[ul]
[li]Without long s, Wachstube is ambiguous, but with long s Wachſtube is unambiguously ‘guard room’ while Wachstube is unambiguously ‘tube of wax’.[/li]
[li]Without long s, you have to know the semantics of Mäuschen to know it’s Mäus|chen [ˈmɔɪ̯sçən] (diminutive of mouse) rather than the nonce word Mäu|schen [ˈmɔɪ̯.ʃən][/li][/ul]
Fraktur is beautiful is used correctly - that concerns the two forms of s and also the ligatures (which also are a help in reading because they do not straddle syllables). Abolishing Fraktur was one of the lasting ways that the Nazi regime impoverished German culture.
I’ve always wondered why they did that. For years, the Nazi government aggressively promoted the use of Fraktur, holding it up as a uniquely German script. Then suddenly, midway through World War II, they completely reversed themselves, condemning the script as a Jewish invention. Did they ever provide any explanation or evidence (however spurious) for this reversal?
(I’m aware that historians have speculated as to the motivations behind Nazi’s about-face on Fraktur, but I’d be interested in knowing whether there are any first-hand accounts as to why they suddenly claimed that Fraktur was Jewish.)
I am German - and at least half-literate, I hope. I can read the headlines shown in the video just fine. But this is only true if I have the context, especially for the capital letters. Seeing just one letter (e.g. when someone’s first name is given only as an initial), I often have trouble discerning some of the (capital) letters, e.g. A and U look very much alike. Or C, I and T could all be T.
I would say I would be sure with B, D, Q, R, X and Z. Then there is a number of letters where I would be left with a certain amount of doubt. And then there are letters that would leave me guessing among a number of different letter. A stand-alone Y could also be a P, a C could also be a T.
I doubt that there are any first-hand accounts. The speculation that it was because the Nazi government realized that the use of Fraktur was hampering communication in the occupied territories is as good a reason as any…
Now, that volte-face (first, standard latin letters are the result of “Jewish influence”, and later Fraktur is a “Jewish script”) reminds me mightily of the “We have always been at war with Eastasia” thing… 
Sure, but condemning Fraktur as a Jewish abomination seems a pretty drastic and hypocritical way of discouraging its use, considering that they had spent the previous eight years loudly extolling its virtues. Seems it would have been more face-saving to explain the use of Roman type as a temporary war measure that would be rolled back once the occupying administrations were in a better position to enforce the use of Fraktur.
That’d be Internet Explorer 11. 
Sorry, it’s the only option I have at this location.
Is that really that hard to read? I’m American and I can read that fine. There’s a couple letterforms that are a bit different from the English black letterforms I’m used to, but there doesn’t seem to me to be anything particularly tricky about it.
Kurrent script, on the other hand, would take a bit of studying.
Just for the record, the font is called Fraktur. Oddly enough the fonts called Gothic are the readily readable sans serif fonts.
When I took three years of German in 1954-57, I was required to learn to read it, which I did very quickly. I still have my old German-English dictionary from then in which the German words are in Fraktur and the English in Roman. The professor said that that was the font used in Germany, so we had better learn to read it. Until someone above mentioned having trouble distinguishing A and U, I had never noticed how similar they are, although I have no trouble telling them apart. The two I find hard to distinguish are B and V. Of course, you also have to look closely to tell the f from the long s. The only difference is whether the horizontal line actually crosses the vertical stroke.
I could never understand why my uncle’s alumni magazine was called The Pennfylvania Gazette (abandoned by the time I became an alumnus).
Danke.
Just an opinion, but to me, that font looks…old. I mean in context - in 1941 I would think that Germany was living in the past, with such a vintage-looking font. Like they were trying to relive the glorious days of the past century. Germany was trying to be the greatest country in the world, and their printed media looks like it should have hand drawn illumination on the sides.
I’m not sating they needed to use comic sans, but there must have been something better, something that conveyed modernity and power without all those needless strokes.
It not wrong to call it blackletter, as the OP did. Fraktur is a kind of blackletter. (It’s also not wrong to call it Gothic, which is a synonym for blackletter, albeit an ambiguous one, since there are other “Gothic” scripts that have nothing to do with blackletter.)
Your post looks fine on my IE11. Just sayin’.
But exactly: they didn’t want to convey modernity, any more than people who use it now do. It was used among other reasons: to remind people of a Glorious Past (Make Deutschalnd Great Again); because it’s Traditional; because we like it damnit. Nowadays it’s also used mostly in stuff trying to look sort of vintage-ish and old-fashioned; you expect to see it on parchment, diplomas, inn signs, not on the brass plaque announcing an architectural firm (unless they specialize in restorations of ancient buildings, of course).