librarian-of-hell on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/librarian-of-hell/art/Fraktur-312488098librarian-of-hell

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Fraktur

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Kind of half-arsed illustration, but the text should be alright. Actually doing it, I came to appreciate the work of Medieval codex makers indeed! By the way, this is the beginning of a rather wonderful poem (full text: [link]).

And a few thoughts as to why am I trying my hand at this art form lately. Fraktur lettering and the German language go together like ham and eggs, and both are as beautiful as they are hard. I'm beginning to think the difficulty is part of the beauty, or at least an indispensable prerequisite of it. And we didn't even mention poetry yet - or indeed music, the arcane sister of poetry, both being children of what prehistoric man would have recognized as rituals of communion with his primeval gods. Germans excel at these two even more than they do in engineering. "Poets and thinkers" indeed, even if - or perhaps because? - sometimes the very same people are also "judges and executioners". Of course, with each contributing a unique flavor, this dual exceptionality is palpable in all the "cousins" as well - just think of Shakespeare and Cromwell, Grieg and Eric the Red. I'm leaning towards the idea that these two aspects cannot exist without each other at all, and that both are among the very few redeeming features of the wretched species we call "human". It is therefore twice as alarming and tragic to see this very strain of humanity having lost nearly all of its self-respect and self-assertive edge these days. (Though, in contrast to my tribe's own desperately excessive attempts at self-justification involving "tracing back" itself to the Sumerian Empire and such... even suicidal lethargy seems more noble.)

Let's not forget that genotype is the foundation of phenotype, and culture is an extended phenotype. Therefore holding on to culture may be just as important as watching over the bloodlines. The two are so interlinked that it's not even clear why there should be a distinction.
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