For an exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don, I was asked to design a poster fea­tur­ing a speech of my choice, for an audi­ence who mainly (only?) spoke English.

A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION IN THE GERMAN TONGUE, DELIVERED AT A BANQUET OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CLUB OF STUDENTS BY MARK TWAIN.

I chose the speech by Mark Twain because all my other favourite speeches would have been in Ger­man, and thus no good to an audi­ence in Lon­don. This excerpt comes from Twain’s essay “The awful Ger­man Lan­guage” and, while large chunks of it are in what he con­sid­ers to be Ger­man, it is still com­pre­hen­si­ble to an audi­ence who doesn’t speak my lan­guage. It uses the prej­u­dice you all have about us, the Krauts. Our lan­guage shows that, indeed, we are a nation of mechan­i­cally minded per­fec­tion­ists. And then again, we’re not. The abil­ity to laugh about our­selves is not too highly devel­oped, but I cer­tainly under­stand Twain’s frus­tra­tion with that awful lan­guage of ours. But at least he went there, learnt it and thus under­stand that a cul­ture can only be appre­ci­ated through its lan­guage. How can any­body who doesn’t speak or under­stand the lan­guage say that Ger­mans have no sense of humour? If we did, he wouldn’t know.

The poster designed itself: the Eng­lish text is set in Caslon, the type­face that George Bernard Shaw always spec­i­fied for his writ­ings; the Ger­man copy is set in Frak­tur, the type­face used for set­ting Ger­man and other north­ern lan­guages since Guten­berg. If it hadn’t been for the Nazis mis­us­ing these faces for their sin­is­ter pur­poses, we would still be read­ing Frak­tur. It is the type­face of Goethe, Mar­tin Luther, Karl Marx and Hegel. And it is per­fectly suited to set our long words and inter­minable sen­tences, still evok­ing Gothic cathe­drals and nar­row streets with tim­bered houses. The one used is called Wit­ten­berg Frak­tur, after the town where Luther nailed his the­ses on a church door in 1517.

twain_poster.pdf