Mila Waldeck In 1946, Max Bill and Jan Tschichold debated different views on typography, craftsmanship and technology in two articles published in the magazine Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen. They were writing in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Nazi regime was a recent memory. Advocating modernist typography, Bill argued that it was the antithesis of the Nazi ideology, which glorified the past instead. Tschichold, in contrast, argued that technological progress was revered by the Nazis and modernists alike.
With clashing stances and arguments, Bill and Tschichold nevertheless agreed that the discourse and practice surrounding technology have an ideological basis. But did the Nazi typography, in practice, substantiate their views?
This presentation revisits the dispute between Max Bill and Jan Tschichold to consider technology and craftsmanship from a historical perspective. While the literature has tended to relate the two articles to Bill and Tschichold’s individual biographies and motivations, this study looks into typographic forms and the beliefs behind them. It examines key typographic examples mentioned by Bill and Tschichold and compares them to examples from the Nazi party. Using secondary sources on architecture, it further analyses such typography in relation to the architectural programme implemented in Nazi Germany. A similar gap between discourse and practice is apparent in the Nazi typography and architecture. Outward references to craftsmanship, meant for public display, concealed a deeper emphasis on an idea of progress rooted in the Nazi racial ideology.