The German Kurrentschrift is a handwriting. Until the middle of the 20th century (in Switzerland until the beginning of the 20th century) it was the general writing in the entire German-speaking area. It is also called German handwriting or Gothic script. However, the term "Gothic script" may also refer to certain broken typefaces. The German Kurrentschrift is only one of the Gothic scripts. It also differs from the Sütterlin script. The latter was only introduced in Prussia in 1915. There are several reasons why this special handwriting came about in Germany. The historical development in the German countries in the 16th and 17th centuries ^Wikipedia played a central role.

Many documents in the archives are handwritten. The typewriter ^Wikipedia was only used more frequently in administration at the end of the 19th century. And even then she wasn't everywhere yet. Especially in the far away places in the colonies many reports were still written by hand for years.

The following paragraphs provide information on how to quickly achieve results when deciphering the current font. Under certain conditions, they can also be used if you have little knowledge of German.

An important note in advance: The German Kurrentschrift is learnable. Many elements of this can also be found in today's Latin script!

Tips for reading

1. The best way to start practicing is to start with simple and short text examples. These are, for example, tables or forms. Success can be achieved quickly here. For longer texts it is better to start with the copies ^Wikipedia. Writing copies was usually more laborious, as these documents had to be read by strangers.


2. As a rule only German words were written in German Kurrentschrift. This is very useful for texts in a colonial context, since, for example, the names of landscapes, persons or languages were written in Latin script in addition.


3. There are many overviews of the individual letters of the alphabet. An example can be found at the bottom of this page.


4. Many letters are very similar to those in the Latin alphabet, e.g. f, g, i, j, l m, n, o, q, r, t, C, F, I, J, K, L or O.


5. The words of the German languages consist of 61% ^Wikipedia only the letters e, n, i, s, r, a and t! If you add d, h and u, these 10 letters cover more than 75 % of all letters in German words! In other words: Whoever recognizes these 10 letters can already decipher three quarters of all characters in a text. Here these letters are shown again in Kurrentschrift: e, n, i, s, [ſ ], r, a, t, d, h, u.


6. The letter S is something special because it exists twice as a lowercase letter, as a short s (s) and as long s (ſ). The most important rule for this is that the short s is used at the end of syllables or at the end of words and the long s at the other places. Some exceptions ^Wikipedia of this rule exist. Since the short s is never at the beginning of a word, there is no capital letter.


7. Some letters are very well recognizable by the additional characters. This includes the dot on the i and the j, the double strokes above the ä, ö and ü and especially the small circle (or hook) above the u. After a short check of the space above a word, you can tell if a u, i, j, ä, ö or ü exists in the word. With u and i this is very important because they can easily be confused with e, n, or m. This becomes visible, for example, when distinguishing between the words mein and nimm. Or mir and nur (meine - nimm ; mir - nur). In addition, an overscore (doubling line) can be placed in the middle of the word above  or . It is an abbreviation for the double spelling of this letter.


8. It is convenient to memorize the differences between similar letters. For example, s, f, h and ß all have ascenders and descenders:ſ, f, h, ß . The difference here is in the loops. With h (h) a lot of importance was attached to the fact that a nice open loop is visible in the descender. The other three letters do not have this loop. The s (ſ ) also has no loop in the top length and the ß (ß) is actually only a combination of characters ^Wikipedia, which starts with a long s.


9. At d (d ) and short s (s) the upper "flags" point in a different direction. This becomes clear when comparing uns and und (uns - und).


10. The word und is also one of the most frequent words in German ^Wikipedia at all. Together with 99 other words, it makes up 47% of German-language texts! Here, too, it is advisable to take a closer look at at least the 30 most common words. They show up practically everywhere.


11. A special feature are the ligatures with c, so ch, ck and especially sch. The c loses its upper check mark here and is now easily confused with i (without dot). An elegant solution is to memorize the ligatures as a unit. After some practice, the characteristic shape of the sch () immediately catches the eye. The remaining "gaps" can then be quickly closed.


12. Experience has shown that the capital letters have the greatest individual deviations. It is quite possible to find a letter that does not exist in this form in any alphabetical overview. A good solution to this problem is to see where the same letter is used again in this text. Sometimes this word is then easier to decipher and in this way the problem letter also reveals its secret.


13. It is sometimes helpful to write the problematic word with a pen on paper and to compare the lines. This makes it possible to quickly exclude certain assumptions about letters. It is also a good exercise to write down your own name for the exercise.


14. A correct orthography is important to be able to read Kurrentschrift well. There are two types of exceptions. The first is that there really was an error while writing. In the second case, the apparent orthographic errors are not errors at all! In the 19th century other spelling rules applied in Germany. For example, h is often found in words like Thal or Mittheilung. It was deleted as a result of the 1901 spelling reform ^Wikipedia. It is therefore advantageous to use old dictionaries when transcribing and translating old texts.


15. Old dictionaries also help to decipher old terms that are no longer in use.


16. Whoever wrote a lot also often used abbreviations. Some abbreviations from that time are hardly used today. This includes for example d.J. (d.J. - this year), v.J (v.J. - previous year), d.M. (d.M. - this month) or v.M. (v.M. - previous month).


17. These tips should be enough to decipher most texts. And even if the copy is difficult to read or the text has not been written correctly - with a little patience they will reveal their contents.

Das Alphabet