124. Fraktur
- Rainey Knudson
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
Imagine hanging your great-great-grandmother's hand-lettered birth certificate on the wall, and nobody in your family can read it. We forget this, but the country is almost as much German as it is English. The two World Wars killed off whatever remained of that identity; suddenly it was socially unacceptable to speak German, or to remember that your family ever had. But there are nearly as many people here with German ancestry as there are with English.
Immigrants came from present-day Germany—then the crumbling remnants of the Holy Roman Empire—in a steady wave starting in the 1700s. In places like southwest Pennsylvania, home of the Pennsylvania Dutch (“Deutsch”), they existed in a kind of bubble, preserving their language and culture, their way of marking the passages of life.
There was no local bureaucracy on the frontier, so these small farmers recorded births, marriages, and other events with hand-lettered, decorated documents, just as they had in the old country. Named fraktur for the medieval, “broken” style of lettering they used, these papers would be tucked into family Bibles, kept quietly for generations. They were honest and uncontrived, suffused with a joyful appreciation for everyday life. Filled with hearts, flowers, and animals, for their makers, fraktur were simply ordinary documents written in a language the Anglo neighbors couldn’t read—neighbors who dismissed them as German peasants, “dumb, hopeless, and beyond possible improvement.”[1] They seemed un-American. Today, their fraktur are some of the most celebrated American folk art.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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[1] "What more fertile ground could there have been than this island of German peasant culture in the new world which, because it was composed of a different language group, was simply dismissed by the surrounding English and Scotch Irish settlers, as dumb, hopeless, and beyond possible improvement?"
Donald A. Shelley, The Fraktur-Writings or Illuminated Manuscripts of the Pennsylvania Germans (Allentown, PA: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, 1961).
