Der Kakteenfreunde (Mannheim)

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This was an excellent although short-lived journal edited in Germany from 1932 to 1935. The main drawback is that the articles are printed using Fraktur script that was in vogue at that time (See comments below). Even readers fluent in German may have difficulties. OCR has been done and it can helps, although it is far from being perfect.

• Read online in the reading room
• Download Original file (with OCR):
  • 1932: DerKakteenfreund-1932.pdf (47.3MB; 2023-05-14)
  • 1933: DerKakteenfreund-1932.pdf (45MB; 2023-05-24)
  • 1934: DerKakteenfreund-1934.pdf (48.7MB; 2023-05-30)

Gothic is the name of a family of old scripts or typefaces, that are also called Blackeletters in English or gebrochene Schrift in German, as opposed to Antiqua typeface family (often called Roman). Fraktur is the name of the old German script of the family that survived until the Nazi period. Initially, the Nazi system promoted Fraktur as representative of German superiority, even though a strange mixture of Fraktur and Antiqua was often used. “Der Kakteenfreund” is a typical example of this propaganda along the rise of the Nazi system in the '30s.
After the declaration of the Second World War, the Nazi system discovered that the Fraktur script was not easily understood by the natives of the conquered countries, and even that it pointed to institutions linked to Nazism which was useful to the resistance fighters, and eventually to the Allied bombers! In order to quickly convince the German people that the Antiqua script was better after all, the Nazi system suddenly attributed the Fraktur script to the Jews, and it was finnaly forbidden in 1941… Ignominy and stupidity have no limits!