That's the optimistic angle; the pessimistic is that Helvetica grew in popularity due to its being nearly the polar opposite of a just-prior-to-mid-century use of Fraktur by a certain european political party.
(Helvetia itself gained a fourth national language in 1938, due to comments made by someone who made his trains run on time; the dutch reformed their spelling in 1947 to distance their language from a neighbouring country in the same language family who they had had the involuntary pleasure of hosting, etc. etc.)
Maria Ivanova tells her class at the end of the day that they should find out what their ancestors did during the Great Patriotic War. The next morning, she calls on little Johnny.
He says "My great-great-grandfather was electrician: his helmet had two lightning bolts..."
Edit: added involuntary, for clarity. Neemt u me niet kwalijk.
> Helvetica grew in popularity due to its being nearly the polar opposite of a just-prior-to-mid-century use of Fraktur by a certain european political party.
Helvetica was developed in 1957 in Switzerland. This was a time when pretty much the only text still printed in blackletter typefaces (like Fraktur) were newspaper mastheads. Outside of Germany blackletter was dead long before that time, and even in Germany it died much earlier.
The so called "gothic" typefaces (to which Fraktur belongs) were ultimately banned in early 1941 there.
So the success of Helvetica has nothing to do with Fraktur. If you ask me its success is based on its on own inherent qualities, combined with a portion of luck.
That is a common misconception. The Nazis initially did not particularly emphasize the use of Fraktur (it was a mixed message), and in 1941 Hitler decided to standardize on Antiqua fonts for all printing. (And modern Grotesks such as Helvetica are based on Antiqua)
> the dutch reformed their spelling in 1947 to distance their language from a neighbouring country in the same language family who they had had the pleasure of hosting
Sorry, what are you trying to say here? The Dutch had the pleasure of hosting what exactly?
> use of Fraktur by a certain european political party
You mean how Nazi abolished Fraktur along with Kurrentschrift?
> On January 3, 1941, Martin Bormann issued a circular to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.
> “In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far.” (Hitler's declaration in the Reichstag, 1934)
To clarify, Nazis did flip their position on Fraktur, and before '41 Antiqua was criticized as ‘Jewish’ just as well. But since the whole country used Fraktur for ages before the ban, associating it with Nazis is ridiculous.
(Helvetia itself gained a fourth national language in 1938, due to comments made by someone who made his trains run on time; the dutch reformed their spelling in 1947 to distance their language from a neighbouring country in the same language family who they had had the involuntary pleasure of hosting, etc. etc.)
Maria Ivanova tells her class at the end of the day that they should find out what their ancestors did during the Great Patriotic War. The next morning, she calls on little Johnny. He says "My great-great-grandfather was electrician: his helmet had two lightning bolts..."
Edit: added involuntary, for clarity. Neemt u me niet kwalijk.