Typewriters were first invented in the early 19th century, with the...
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*pouring
Kurrent is an old form of German-language handwriting based on late...
Silberstein was actually a well-known critic of Einstein’s theories...
Here's an example of a letter from Max Planck written in Latin curs...
English only began gaining traction as the dominant language of sci...
Analyzing Einstein’s handwriting
Ryan Dahn
26 August 2021
A handwritten letter featuring the famous E = mc
2
recently sold for more than a million dollars.
But what does Einstein’s handwriting tell us about the man himself?
More than 65 years after his death, Albert Ein-
stein continues to fascinate—to the extent that a
1946 letter he wrote containing the famous E =
mc
2
equation recently sold for nearly $1.25 million
at auction (see figure 1). Even Einstein’s hand-
writing has achieved pop culture status: A few
years ago, after diligently poring over hundreds of
Einstein manuscripts, typographer Harald Geisler
transformed Einstein’s cursive into a computer-
ized font.
Figure 1: Dated 26 October 1946, this letter from
Albert Einstein to Polish American physicist Lud-
wik Silberstein is one of only four instances in
which Einstein is known to have handwritten the
famous E = mc
2
equation. The letter sold at auc-
tion in May for $1,243,708.
The Einstein font may seem like another piece
of Einstein-related kitsch, analogous to dorm room
posters of the famous physicist sticking out his
tongue. Yet dismissing Einstein’s handwriting as
just handwriting would be imprudent. Aside from
being worth thousands or millions of dollars at
auction, Einstein’s handwriting is a microcosm of
his turbulent life.
German cursive
Handwriting was far more important in Einstein’s
day than it is now. Typewriters were only just
becoming commonplace when Einstein came of
age around 1900. Most communication remained
handwritten, which meant that learning to write
by hand cleanly and legibly was a crucial life skill.
Einstein would have devoted much of his time
as an elementary school student learning how to
write in script. Repetitive handwriting exercises
in copybooks were the name of the game. Einstein
spent most of his early childhood in Munich, but
such an emphasis on handwriting was not partic-
ular to Germany. Where Einstein’s education dif-
fered was in the number of scripts that he learned.
Along with print writing and a cursive like the
one still sometimes taught today, Einstein would
have also learned another cursive script particular
to the German-speaking world: Kurrentschrift, or
Kurrent script, often referred to today as the “old
German script.” As shown in figure 2, the letters
of the Latin alphabet in Kurrent look quite differ-
ent from the Latin cursive that some readers may
recall learning in elementary school. The Kurrent
alphabet is famously tricky to decipher; most na-
tive German speakers today cannot read it, and
historians like myself love to complain about it.
1
Figure 2: The German alphabet in Kurrent script.
Students at German schools were taught this al-
phabet or its derivatives until 1941. At bottom
are letter combinations including ch, ck, th, sch,
and st, which are very common in German.
It is a beautifully florid, loopy script,
which—frankly speaking—also makes it highly
impractical. Many of the letters look similar. The
lowercase s and h look very different than they
do in Latin script—in Kurrent, the two letters
extend both above and below the line on which
they are written. Adding to the confusion, the
s and h also look alike. And if the handwriting
was sloppy or rushed, lowercase e, r, m, and n can
look almost identical. Because German’s system
of grammatical cases often involves distinguishing
among the articles der, den, and dem, among oth-
ers, the similarities among those letters in Kurrent
often make it hard to parse the meaning of a sen-
tence—especially for nonnative speakers. The up-
percase letters are similarly frustrating: L, B, and
C can look alike, as can J and T. (Pro tip: If you
ever come across an uppercase letter in Kurrent
that you can’t decipher, it’s probably a G.)
Why did the German-speaking world have two
different handwriting scripts? The answer goes
back to the Middle Ages. Around 1150 a new
script, blackletter (also called Gothic), emerged
from various lowercase scripts. If you’ve ever seen
a medieval manuscript, you’ve likely seen black-
letter. When the printing press was invented, in
the 1400s, the first printed books—including the
Gutenberg Bible—were set in blackletter type (see
figure 3).
Figure 3: The first lines of the book of Genesis in
the copy of the Gutenberg Bible held by the Berlin
State Library. The Gutenberg Bible was printed
in a blackletter font; the elaborate illuminations
were added by hand after the pages were printed.
Not until the Renaissance did the predeces-
sor of modern handwriting emerge. At that time,
humanists such as Petrarch (1304–74) became in-
terested in the writings of the ancient Greeks and
Romans. They combed through monasteries in
search of the earliest known manuscripts of var-
ious ancient texts. Erroneously believing that
those manuscripts, which had been written in the
early Middle Ages, reflected the typeface of an-
cient Rome, they developed a new script known
as Antiqua. By the late 1700s, derivatives of An-
tiqua had gradually replaced blackletter typefaces
in Britain and the rest of Western Europe. You’re
reading the present article in an Antiqua-based
font. (Blackletter types do survive in special cases:
Newspaper mastheads like those of the New York
Times, for example, use such fonts.)
But in the German-speaking lands and in the
Nordic countries and the Baltic states that were
heavily influenced by German culture, the use
of blackletter type—in a form known as Frak-
tur—persisted through the 19th century. Most
German-language newspapers, for example, were
printed in Fraktur until after World War II. Kur-
rent persisted as the handwritten counterpart to
2
Fraktur. Counting uppercase and lowercase let-
ters as separate alphabets, Germanophone stu-
dents had to learn how to read eight different
alphabets: the Antiqua typefaces we use today,
Latin handwritten cursive, Fraktur typefaces, and
Kurrent script.
Einstein and Kurrent
Most of Einstein’s writings were composed in
Latin cursive, including the letter auctioned off re-
cently. But his earliest correspondence was writ-
ten in the old German script; he used it almost
exclusively until he was in his mid 20s. Interest-
ingly, Einstein abandoned his use of the old Ger-
man script in the annus mirabilis year of 1905.
That May, Einstein wrote a letter in Kurrent to
his friend Conrad Habicht announcing the four
annus mirabilis papers. By July 1905 he had
switched to Latin script and would never again
use the older one. Why did Einstein switch
scripts? As far as is known, he never spoke pub-
licly about that decision, but there were likely two
reasons. The first was practical. Although all for-
eign scientists of note in that era were able to
read German—which was one of the major lan-
guages of science of the day, along with English
and French—they struggled to read letters writ-
ten in Kurrent. Even scientists who used Kurrent
with fellow German speakers, such as Max Planck
and Erwin Schr¨odinger (see figure 4), would write
to their foreign colleagues in Latin cursive (but
still in German, of course).
Figure 4: A letter from Max Planck dated 11 Jan-
uary 1942. Planck’s Kurrent handwriting, which
he used only when writing to other native German
speakers, is famed among historians for its illegi-
bility. Many scientists of Planck’s generation used
Kurrent until their death.
It was for this reason that most German scien-
tific journals were printed in Antiqua, not Fraktur,
having shifted to the former by the middle of the
19th century.
But there was probably a second reason for
Einstein’s handwriting change. Around 1900, the
German Empire was roiled by a culture war. In-
ternational avant-garde trends in art, literature,
music, and architecture coexisted in an uneasy
tension with Germany’s global imperialist ambi-
tions.
Handwriting and typefaces were drawn into
the culture war. During the 19th century, An-
tiqua typefaces and Latin cursive gradually made
inroads in educated German society. (Other coun-
tries that used Fraktur, like the Nordic countries,
largely began shifting to Antiqua in the late 19th
century as well.) The Grimm brothers, for exam-
ple, were famous advocates of Antiqua fonts. The
fonts gradually became associated with the liberal
intelligentsia and were often seen as a signal that
the writer was more international in outlook.
Predictably, that trend provoked a backlash
from conservatives, particularly among the advo-
cates of ethnonationalist theories that foreshad-
3
owed Nazism. The “Antiqua–Fraktur dispute,” as
it became known, culminated in a heated debate
in the imperial German Reichstag on 4 May 1911,
during which a proposal to begin instruction of
young children in Antiqua and Latin cursive re-
ceived 85 votes in favor to 82 against. It neverthe-
less failed because the 397-member body failed to
reach a quorum. In other words, a majority of the
German Reichstag chose to dodge the question.
(The Antiqua–Fraktur dispute was not a histori-
cal outlier; similar battles over potential reforms
to handwriting or typography were occurring dur-
ing this period in what are now Turkey, Russia,
and China.)
To be sure, there were exceptions to the gen-
eral rule that conservatives preferred Fraktur and
Kurrent and liberals preferred Antiqua and Latin
script. Before 1933, most German-language news-
papers of all political leanings were printed in
Fraktur. Thus many of Einstein’s pre-1933 pop-
ular writings were typeset in Fraktur. Older in-
dividuals who grew up with Kurrent—including
prominent intellectuals like Planck and Sigmund
Freud—often kept writing in it.
In any event, choosing a handwriting script
became an increasingly political act. Given Ein-
stein’s pacifism and his abhorrence of German mil-
itarism and nationalism, it seems highly probable
that Einstein switched to Latin cursive in 1905 for
political reasons as well as practical ones. Despite
living in Switzerland at that time, he likely wanted
to signal to foreign colleagues that he was toler-
ant, open to international communication, and not
a rabid German nationalist.
Einstein’s handwriting
After the shift, Einstein’s handwriting remained
remarkably consistent. It very much resembles the
cursive still taught in some schools today.
Some Germans in Einstein’s time who shifted
to writing in Latin script incorporated Kurrent-
style letters or flourishes into their Latin
script—most commonly a little divot above the
lowercase u, which in Kurrent was meant to dis-
tinguish it from n and m. But Einstein made a
clean break from Kurrent; his Latin script lacks
any traces of the old German script in it. He even
stopped using the eszett (β), the special German
letter denoting the combination of a “long s” (f)
and a “short s” (the lowercase s used today). (The
“long s” is not unique to German; it was used in
English until the early 19th century and is visible
on older handwritten documents such as the Dec-
laration of Independence.) Most Germans who
switched from Kurrent to the Latin script retained
the eszett in their handwriting, and it is still used
today in printed and handwritten German. The
funny extra loop on Einstein’s uppercase E isn’t
from Kurrent; it’s just one of those handwriting
quirks that make us all distinct.
What happened to Kurrent and Fraktur?
Ironically, it wasn’t the Allies’ victory in 1945 that
led to their demise but a decree by the Nazis them-
selves. Although many Nazis despised Antiqua,
Adolf Hitler did not. Fraktur and Kurrent were
too provincial for his megalomaniacal visions. If
the Germans were to be the master race, he ar-
gued, conquered peoples would need to be able
to read their language—and how could they do
so if German was printed and written in a script
that was so hard to decipher? At the height of
his power, in January 1941, Hitler issued a de-
cree to phase out Kurrent and Fraktur. Absurdly,
it claimed that the scripts had been invented by
Jews. Attempts to bring back instruction in Kur-
rent in postwar West Germany went nowhere, and
communist East Germany had no interest in res-
urrecting a script associated with conservative na-
tionalists. Today most German speakers can’t
read the script at all.
Ryan Dahn is the books editor at Physics
Today. A historian of science, he studies 19th-
and 20th-century physics in the German-speaking
lands. He is working on a biography of German
physicist Pascual Jordan tentatively titled Nazi
Entanglement.
4
Here's an example of a letter from Max Planck written in Latin cursive.
Silberstein was actually a well-known critic of Einstein’s theories.
"Your question can be answered from the $E= mc^2$ formula without any erudition"
Einstein wrote in the letter written on Princeton University letterhead.
The letter was part of Silberstein’s personal archives which were sold by his descendants.
Kurrent is an old form of German-language handwriting based on late medieval cursive writing. Its full name is Kurrentschrift, or Alte Deutsche Schrift ("old German script").
This script was widely used in German-speaking regions from the early 16th century until the mid-20th century. Characterized by sharp angles and a rightward slant, Kurrent was typically written with a quill or later with a broad-nibbed pen, leading to variations in stroke thickness.
Over time, it evolved into various styles, with one notable variant being the Sütterlin script, introduced in the early 20th century to simplify handwriting instruction in schools.
English only began gaining traction as the dominant language of science in the mid 20th century, especially after World War II:
- **After World War I** : Political tensions began to affect international collaboration. Some English- and French-speaking scientists began avoiding German publications.
- **After World War II**: The U.S. emerged as a global scientific powerhouse. As American funding, institutions, and journals became dominant, English rapidly became the global language of science.
- **By the 1970s–1980s**: English had clearly overtaken other languages in scientific publishing. Most major journals and conferences used English, even in non-English-speaking countries.
*pouring
*pouring
Typewriters were first invented in the early 19th century, with the earliest practical model patented by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868. This design became the basis for the first commercially successful typewriter, produced by Remington in 1873. Typewriters gradually gained popularity throughout the late 19th century/early 20th century, especially in offices and businesses.
The Royal Typewriter Company, a prominent manufacturer only produced its 10 millionth typewriter in December 1957.
