Sütterlin is a special form of the old German blackletter handwriting ("Spitzschrift") that was taught in schools between ca. 1920 and 1941.

It is named after its designer, Ludwig Sütterlin , a German graphical designer and teacher.

Sütterlin was installed in Prussia in 1915, and from the 1920s onwards began to replace the relatively similar old German handwriting in schools. In 1935 it officially became part of the curriculum as an "Aryan script".

When the Nazis conquered much of Europe, they found that commands in the local language could not be understood when written in Sütterlin, so, in 1941, like all blackletter typefaces, it was declared "un-German" and suddenly banned, with the Nazi government claiming it was a "Jewish script". After World War II, Sütterlin was again used in some schools until the 1970s.

The Sütterlin lower-case 'e' resembles two slanted bars, in which the origin of the umlaut diacritic from a small 'e' written above the modified vowel can be seen.

Sütterlin is based on the old German handwriting, which is a handwriting form of the blackletter scripts such as fraktur or schwabacher, the German print scripts which were used during the same time.

It also had the long s (ſ), as well as several standard ligatures such as , and of course ß (s-z).

For most people outside of Germany, as well as younger Germans, Sütterlin is nearly illegible — even more so than Fraktur printing. Sütterlin letters are still sometimes used for mathematical symbols which would use Fraktur letters in print.

See also

• — images of all the characters of the Latin alphabet set in Sütterlin

External links

• The Sütterlin script at Omniglot
• Freeware Sütterlin font, from Prof Don Becker of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This is the font used to set the sample characters at
• Learn Sütterlin, a lesson, with sample texts