Part I: When Did Handwriting Stop Having to Be Beautiful?
There are certain things about which I apparently belong to another age. Handwriting is one of them. I enjoy writing by hand, not merely because it is practical, but because the form of the writing itself matters to me. I have learned several historical scripts, I repeatedly use writing in my photographic work, and at present I am once again taking lessons with a calligrapher to improve my handwriting. One might reasonably object that this is entirely unnecessary. I can write, my handwriting is legible, and I can use it to transfer information from my head onto a sheet of paper and from there into somebody else’s head. The essential purpose of writing would therefore seem to have been fulfilled. But is that really its only purpose? As soon as we start talking about handwriting, we encounter three concepts that get along surprisingly badly with one another: function, legibility and beauty.
A few years ago, a new school handwriting system called Prima was developed in Vienna and has since been expanded into the Primæ type family. It is intended to make learning to write easier, encourage a natural writing flow, make letters more readily distinguishable and facilitate the transition between unjoined and joined handwriting. It also contains an extensive character set designed to accommodate the linguistic diversity of a city such as Vienna. Prima is based on considerations of writing motor skills, legibility, ergonomics, multilingualism and different learning needs. None of these are absurd objectives. Quite the opposite. Individual letters are meant to be easier to learn and distinguish from one another, which is also intended to benefit children who have difficulties with reading.
I have only one objection, and compared with all these perfectly reasonable arguments it sounds almost embarrassingly trivial: I do not think the script is beautiful. Looking at it, I cannot help imagining a meeting. At some point, people must have had samples of the script lying on a table or displayed on a screen. Specialists will have discussed writing motor skills, legibility, learning requirements, multilingualism and inclusion. Typographers will have discussed letterforms, spacing and connections. There were probably presentations and a great many good arguments. In my imagination, I keep waiting for somebody to stand up, point at the sample and say: “Excuse me. Have we actually looked at this? Compared with the script we are giving up, this one is bloody ugly. Surely we cannot seriously teach this to our children.”
That scene is, of course, entirely imaginary. And “bloody ugly” is my judgement, not an objective finding. The designers themselves describe Prima as elegant, and the typeface has also received an award for its type design. So there are clearly people with considerable typographic expertise who do not share my assessment. I can live with that. The more interesting question is what weight my objection would carry in the first place. Legibility can be studied, writing speed measured, learning difficulties observed and the number of available characters counted. Criteria can be defined for all of these, tables compiled and, presumably, some very attractive presentations prepared. Beauty has a harder time of it. It sits rather forlornly at the far end of the conference table and can really only say: “But just look at it.” Probably not a particularly robust argument for a working group.
Let us go back roughly 175 years. An Austrian schoolchild at that time would have learned Kurrent, the historical cursive handwriting traditionally used in German-speaking Central Europe. It should not be confused with Sütterlin, although outside specialist circles virtually every old German handwriting is now liable to be called Sütterlin. Sütterlin was developed in Germany only in the early twentieth century and belongs to a much later stage in this history. Kurrent around 1850 had a different ductus from its later, simplified forms and certainly from the handwriting taught in schools today. It was slanted, rhythmic and animated. Ascenders and descenders structured the written image, the letters followed a pronounced flow of movement, and with the appropriate pen the contrast between fine hairlines and heavier shaded strokes provided much of its tension. I love this script and have written it myself. What fascinates me is the movement behind it. A well-executed Kurrent hand of that period possesses, to my eye, an elegance extending far beyond its task of putting readable language onto paper. You do not merely see letters. You see rhythm and movement.
That does not, of course, mean that everyone in the nineteenth century wrote beautifully. Anyone who has ever tried to decipher historical letters, parish registers or other handwritten sources is rapidly cured of that romantic notion. Some historical hands give the impression that their author was simultaneously writing, riding a horse and attempting to extinguish a small domestic fire. The crucial difference is not that everyone used to write beautifully. It is that writing beautifully was regarded as a skill worth teaching. Proportions, slant, spacing and movements were not arbitrary. A child was not merely supposed to put a letter onto paper in a form that allowed another person to work out which letter was intended. The child was expected to learn to form it well. The hand was trained, not merely taught to record information.
Beautiful handwriting has obviously not disappeared. People practise calligraphy, attend courses, learn historical scripts and voluntarily spend hours refining movements that have long since become perfectly adequate for the mere transmission of information. I am one of them. What has largely disappeared is not beautiful handwriting itself, but its self-evident place as a general educational expectation: the idea that handwriting ought not merely to be legible and fluent, but beautiful as well, and that teaching this ability might be one of the tasks of school. Beauty has not been abolished. Its status has simply changed. What was increasingly once a “should” of schooling has become a private “may”.
Kurrent itself did not, of course, remain unchanged. The script of around 1900 differs noticeably in its ductus from that of the mid-nineteenth century, and I know this later Kurrent from more than historical samples. For years I used it for personal notes in my bullet journal. I was obviously not writing calligraphically there. It was genuine everyday handwriting: written quickly, personally distorted and, over time, so automatic that I no longer had to think about the individual letters. It did, however, have an extremely useful side effect: only I could read my handwriting. For highly personal thoughts, this was ideal. As a cryptographic system it would probably have failed any serious test; against curious fellow human beings it worked remarkably well.
Some years ago this led to a rather entertaining discussion with my tax adviser. We were talking about the logbook used to document business journeys and whether I could actually keep mine in Kurrent. My position was fairly straightforward: why not? At the time there were still enough Austrian taxpayers alive who had learned this script at school themselves. Was it really unreasonable to expect an Austrian tax inspector to be able to read a former Austrian school script? My tax adviser found this line of reasoning considerably less entertaining than I did. We prudently refrained from having the matter tested in court – probably one of our better joint decisions.
There is, however, a serious question hidden inside this minor dispute: when exactly is a script legible? Is it enough for it to have been written according to established rules, or must the intended reader also know those rules? A remarkably similar question was actually decided by a German court. A prisoner in Celle corresponded with his fiancée in Sütterlin, a simplified German handwriting system introduced in the early twentieth century. Checking the letters was, according to the prison authorities, becoming excessively laborious, and they eventually wanted such correspondence withheld and returned unless the prisoner was prepared to pay the costs of a transcription and accept the resulting delays. The prison itself used the word “translation” – although no other language was involved.
In 2009, the Higher Regional Court of Celle disagreed. The mere use of Sütterlin was not sufficient to classify a letter as secret writing, illegible or incomprehensible. Particularly interesting is the court’s reasoning about legibility: one could take into account which scripts the average population had learned to read at school. At the time, the court considered Sütterlin still readable by substantial sections of the population; members of the prison staff could read it as well. At the same time, the court explicitly observed that this assessment might change in the future because handwriting instruction in schools was itself changing. The decision was issued on 19 May 2009 under case number 1 Ws 248/09 (StrVollz).
I find that remarkable because it turns our notion of legibility on its head. A script can remain completely unchanged for generations and nevertheless gradually become unreadable. Not because its letters have altered, but because the people who learned how to read them are disappearing. A society can make a script illegible simply by ceasing to teach it. At the same time, this shows how relative the concept of functionality really is. The Kurrent in my bullet journal was functional because hardly anyone else could read it. The same script in a tax logbook might eventually cease to fulfil its function for precisely the same reason. The script has not changed. Only its purpose and its reader have. A script is not simply functional. It is functional for something and for someone.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ludwig Sütterlin developed a new model handwriting for German schools. Again, there was an entirely understandable idea behind it: writing should be easier to learn. The script became more upright, its forms more elementary and its strokes more uniform. In the process, however, it lost much of what I find aesthetically appealing about older Kurrent: the slant, the pronounced modulation of the strokes, some of its tension and movement. I do not like Sütterlin. That is not a scholarly judgement but an aesthetic one. To me, it is an improvement that made things worse. I can understand the pedagogical logic of simplification and still find the result less beautiful.
This raises an interesting question: what may simplification be allowed to cost? If a difficult form is made easier to learn, that is initially a gain. But if some of that difficulty is precisely what trains abilities that later make quality possible, the calculation becomes more complicated. A demanding pen requires control. Pressure and release have to be right, and the hand has to learn movements until they become automatic. The result of that effort is not merely that a legible “M” eventually appears on the paper. The effort itself develops a skill. This is not an argument that difficulty has value in itself, or that children ought to struggle with something simply because generations before them struggled with it too. But there is a difference between unnecessary difficulty and the practice necessary to master a skill. Anyone who wants to play the piano, draw or write calligraphically will have to teach the hand things it cannot initially do.
A radical break came in 1941. In the territories controlled by National Socialist Germany, an order was issued to abandon the so-called German scripts. In Martin Bormann’s circular of 3 January 1941, Antiqua was declared the “normal script”, and schools were eventually to teach only this form. The circular justified the change with the antisemitic and historically false claim that the so-called Gothic type consisted of “Schwabacher Jewish letters”. Historians have discussed the additional practical and political motives behind this abrupt reversal; the order itself also referred to publications intended for circulation abroad. For our purposes, however, something else matters: the adoption of Latin letterforms by no means required the abandonment of beautiful handwriting. The history of Latin calligraphy demonstrates almost the opposite. One need only look at a fine Copperplate hand to abandon the notion that beauty was the exclusive property of Kurrent. International legibility, Latin letterforms and a high aesthetic standard are perfectly compatible.
Let us jump forward to Austria in the 1990s. The Austrian School Script of 1995 was explicitly conceived not as an obligatory norm but as a model alphabet for beginners. Letters and numerals were to be clear, unambiguous and easy to write, while children were given room for individual development provided those basic criteria were met. Even slant and size allowed considerable personal variation. This represents an interesting change. The model no longer defines an aesthetic final result to be reproduced as exactly as possible; instead, it provides a functional foundation from which individual handwriting is expected to develop.
There are good reasons for this too. People are different, hands are different and movements are different. Personal handwriting need not resemble a standardised technical drawing. Nevertheless, something happens here that interests me. The aesthetic quality of handwriting is neither prohibited nor does it disappear. It simply loses some of its weight, attention and importance as an educational objective in its own right. And that brings us back to Prima.
The Vienna education platform describes the change of emphasis with remarkable openness. Under the heading “Self-empowerment instead of compulsion”, it contrasts Prima with earlier approaches that aimed at writing as beautifully as possible. Prima, by contrast, is intended to emphasise the function of writing. The rigid structure of fully joined handwriting is loosened, the transition to unjoined writing is made easier, and children are supposed to learn to write more intuitively and quickly. Our original question is therefore almost there in black and white: the function of handwriting is moving to the foreground relative to the expectation of writing as beautifully as possible.
And that is precisely where I get stuck. Not because I reject the other objectives. A script that makes it easier for a child to learn to write is useful. If letters are easier to distinguish and this helps children who struggle, that is useful. If a script better reflects the actual linguistic diversity of a city, that is useful. And if it facilitates the transition between different ways of writing, that too is an argument. But why should function and beauty have to be played off against one another at all? Why should a school script have to be either easier to learn, ergonomic, inclusive, multilingual and functional or beautiful?
The designers of Prima would probably disagree with me at this point. They themselves describe their script as elegant. I nevertheless stand by my judgement: I do not find it beautiful. But that turns my personal matter of taste into a much more interesting question. What status does beauty retain once all functional requirements have been met?
I do not expect a twenty-first-century primary-school child to learn the Kurrent of 1850. That would be absurd. Almost two centuries of social, technological and educational change lie between those two worlds. Nor do I want to return to a school in which children are humiliated because they have formed a letter badly, and I do not regard individual handwriting as a sign of cultural decline. My question is much simpler: When did handwriting stop having to be beautiful? When did the aim of learning to write beautifully, fluently and legibly become primarily the aim of learning to write fluently and legibly? And why was beauty, of all things, the quality that lost weight?
Perhaps handwriting is merely a particularly visible example of a broader development. We have learned to judge things according to their function. They should serve their purpose, be easy to use, economical to produce, ergonomic and accessible to as many people as possible. None of these are bad qualities. Quite the opposite. But functionality is not the natural enemy of beauty. Perhaps the real problem does not begin when we simplify things or make them more functional. Perhaps it begins when a functional solution is already regarded as a sufficient solution and the question of beauty is no longer asked as a matter of course.
Because we have clearly not lost our desire for beautiful handwriting. People practise calligraphy, buy beautiful writing instruments, look at historical manuscripts and respond to something that has visibly been written by hand with skill and attention. Perhaps we have not lost beauty at all. Perhaps we have merely stopped regarding it as a self-evident expectation. Beauty has moved from the realm of “should” to the realm of “could”.
For the moment, that is merely an observation about handwriting. In the second part I want to ask the question on a larger scale. Perhaps this shift concerns not only the way we form letters, but also objects, architecture, craftsmanship and design – and ultimately the question of why we should invest time and effort in something that could be done more quickly, more easily and more cheaply.
After all, it would work without it.