The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  The German national union of primary school teachers started a campaign in 2011 to abolish the teaching of the national cursive model nationwide. The forces of conservatism and the sixty-eight-ish forces of child-centred freedom square up against each other; the forces of nationhood and duty, impressed upon an increasingly multicultural nation, seem to many an absurd thing to hope to embody in loops and curves, or in a decision about whether your letters should join according to the Model Latin Script or not.

  Like Germany, the Scandinavian countries shifted from gothic letterforms to a more universally comprehensible international style. In their case, however, the shift took place in the nineteenth century. Starting with Sweden, and subsequently in Denmark, Iceland and Norway, copperplate was the universally preferred style. Only in the postwar period did a revision of letterforms take place. Alvhild Bjerkenes, in the period from 1947 to 1962, introduced a model in Norway and subsequently Denmark, with, apparently, a great deal of argument about the benefits of handwriting models on medical grounds – ‘the ergonomic arguments [were] often mixed with political, moral, social, hygienic and aesthetic arguments’.5 In Sweden and Iceland, a more italic model was introduced – in Sweden in 1982, after models by Kerstin Ankers. It must be one of the few countries to have adopted the italic schemes so hopefully promoted by British italic campaigners in the 1950s, such as Reginald Piggott, and seems to have pushed handwriting in the direction of formal calligraphy. It introduced the use of a four-lined stave to control the formation of letters throughout the educational system. In Rosemary Sassoon’s view, the Swedish experience was not altogether successful – ‘over-emphasis on appearance led to slow and painful writing’.

  Perhaps the effects of national writing models are not as long-lasting, or as marked, as teachers hope. When I see a student’s handwritten work, more often than not it has a conspicuously round nature, as if someone has sat on the letters and squashed them into cushions. The same writing style can be seen in student work, wherever in Europe they were originally taught. The allure of the fat roundhand, sometimes to the point of illegibility, seems to be stronger than the pull of the four-line stave and Marion Richardson-derived letterforms – strong enough, indeed, to transcend most international borders, and students from North America or anywhere in Europe may perfectly plausibly possess, for twenty or thirty years, the same fat, sat-on sort of handwriting. If, that is, any student writes by hand at all.

  12 ~ Witness

  Interviewer: ‘Have you ever had handwriting lessons at school?’

  A: ‘No, not proper handwriting lessons, not really. Well, you sort of get lines, and you get letters, and you get dots – you have to follow the dots. Well, you have the L, and you have the dots, and you have to do it, and after three dots they stop, and you have to do it on your own . . . D, A.’

  B: ‘And then you do more, don’t you? You do more flowing ones, don’t you?’

  A: ‘Yeah.’

  B: ‘And then you do the more joined-up ones, with tails . . .’

  C: ‘Doesn’t really improve my handwriting much. I don’t have handwriting lessons any more. It stopped in Year 4. It was boring. Well, you didn’t really have handwriting lessons. You did it before the start of lessons, like, when you come in, before you go to hymn practice at assembly, you’d do like three lines of handwriting. I did do the three lines, only I wasn’t very neat in doing so. I did it in pencil because I didn’t have a pen licence because I had such rubbish handwriting. I never had a pen licence. I never had a pen licence.’

  Interviewer: ‘Pen licence?’

  C: ‘Nowadays you now have a pen licence.’

  ‘A’ giggles uncontrollably.

  C: ‘So that you had to use pencil.’

  B: ‘I think Robert got so old that they just gave him a pen licence – he didn’t actually get it.’

  Interviewer: ‘What happens when you get a pen licence?’

  D: ‘You get to use a pen.’

  Interviewer: ‘No, I mean, is it like a ceremony?’

  C: ‘No, you just get a licence that says “Pen Licence” on it. In front of the whole class. Everyone applauds. Well, yeah. They’re meant to.’

  A: ‘I guess it depends on who you are.’

  D: ‘Yes, if you’re the last child to get a pen licence.’

  C: ‘If you’re the last child to get a pen licence, it’s more like [makes slow handclap]. There’s a forfeit for the rest of the class if you’re late, you see. I haven’t seen anyone’s handwriting which I’m vaguely impressed with, yet. I’ll see if I can try and understand yours.’

  B: ‘I always regret that I’ve got really scrappy handwriting. I’ve tried to improve it. But it’s hard. I remember doing the letters from the books, and then the joining-up bit. After that, I don’t think it was the style that you were offered, backwards, upright, slanting. I had a tendency to write like that – [demonstrates] – to hide the fact that I couldn’t spell that well.’

  C: ‘“What should I write to demonstrate the beauty of my hand” – is that what it says? What’s that thing there?’

  Interviewer: ‘It’s recording everything you say and it’s going to go in my book.’

  A: E.L.A., female, 14

  B: C.A., engineer, 49

  C: R.J.A., male, 11

  D: K.Y.A., systems analyst, 49

  13 ~ Hitler’s Handwriting

  Hitler seems to have disliked writing by hand altogether. One of the reasons why it has been possible for extremist ‘historians’ to make the odious case that he actually knew nothing of the Final Solution was that, in his twelve years as Chancellor, he ‘very rarely committed his thoughts on important issues to paper in formal memoranda.’1 That is true even of typed documents. He himself stopped writing anything by hand long before his death. One of the last surviving examples of his handwriting comes in a private testament of 2 May 1938 – the subsequent testament, drawn up just before his suicide in 1945, is typewritten. Subsequently, he grew worried about the legal basis of this testament, believing that, as an unnotarized will, it had by law to be written entirely by hand, not including the printed headings on his notepaper – this seems not to have been the case.2

  Hitler had the handwriting that you might expect of someone of his limited educational background. His short encounter with the educational establishment included the Realschule in Linz where, for at least one year, his presence overlapped with that of the philosopher Wittgenstein, then at an early stage in his schooling.* Interestingly, Wittgenstein’s poor written German led to him failing one exam – the Linz Realschule evidently didn’t do a good job in encouraging its alumni to write. What we see in Hitler’s handwriting of 1938 is a script that must have seemed old-fashioned to some parts of the German-speaking world even at the time of his schooling, forty years before, and by 1938 was certainly passing out of use. For instance, he indicates a double m in kommt by a line over the single m, in the black-letter style. After 1938, he apparently gave up writing at all by hand.

  As we have seen, that didn’t stop him from taking an interest in handwriting, and in 1941 decreeing that the established Sütterlin Fraktur hand should be abandoned in German schools in favour of a more modern Latin script. The main interest of Hitler’s handwriting, however, is what happened to it after he died.

  Because of the abandonment of Sütterlin in 1941, and the confirmation of that decision after the war by the authorities of East and West Germany, by the 1970s only trained specialists could read historic Fraktur scripts. By the 1970s, too, there was an enormous market in fake Nazi documents, including forged signatures and even letters purporting to be by Hitler. The trade was encouraged not only by the fascination and horror of the subject, but also by the fact that it was harder to detect a forgery where not many people could read what was being written.

  Around 1980, some diaries, supposedly written by Hitler, started to surface. They were the most abject forgeries, which anybody ought to have been able to see through from the start. The s
tory of how Stern magazine and its star reporter, Gerd Heidemann, were fooled by a small-time con man called Konrad Kujau, and how in turn Heidemann defrauded his employer of millions of Deutschmarks before allowing the UK Sunday Times to make a perfect ass of itself has been brilliantly told by Robert Harris in his classic Selling Hitler. What interests us here is the light cast on the analysis of handwriting by the behaviour of several ‘experts’ in the field of forensic analysis.

  The handwriting of Hitler is a favourite topic of many graphologists, who enjoy pointing out the features in his hand which indicate his megalomaniacal psychopathy. Some graphologists indicate particular graphic features in his writing – for instance the slant of his writing – which indicate his specific politics or even his genocidal tendencies. Given the faint eccentricity of graphologists when in character-analysis mode, perhaps some caution ought to have been exerted when asking them to put on their forensic-analysis hat.

  There were a number of problems that arose when considering the authenticity of the ‘Hitler Diaries’. First, hardly anybody in the Stern building apart from the crook Heidemann could read the script – this was forty years after the abandonment of Fraktur in German schools. Secondly, the handwriting experts who examined the script were either not up to the job, working within a fatally flawed discipline, or given misleading evidence to work on. A Doctor Max Frei-Sulzer, a former head of the forensic department of the Zurich police, was ‘provided with two photocopies of documents from the Stern hoard: the Hess statement and a draft telegram to the Hungarian ruler, Admiral Horthy.’

  As comparison material, Frei-Sulzer was supplied with . . . copies of authentic Hitler writing . . . a third set of documents for comparison was provided by Gerd Heidemann from his private collection . . . Unfortunately for Frei-Sulzer, these supposedly genuine examples of the Fuhrer’s writings were also the work of Konrad Kujau, a confusion which meant that the scientist in some instances would be comparing Kujau’s hand with Kujau’s.3

  Another expert, Ordway Hilton, an American forensic examiner, was also roped in, although he could not even understand German, let alone the difficult hand. When his report came in, it stated that ‘The lack of lower loop, the flattened single-space letters, the variable use of letterforms and the interruptions in the words especially at points when the letterforms are connected in other instances are all common to both the known and this page of writing under investigation. The combination of all these factors establishes in my opinion adequate proof that this document was written by the same person who prepared all the known writings . . . I must conclude that [Hitler] prepared the document.’4

  Hilton was completely wrong, as was Frei-Sulzer, who declared that ‘there can be no doubt that both these documents were written by Adolf Hitler’. Only at the very end of the disastrous story was any doubt voiced, when a further handwriting analyst, Kenneth Rendell, carried out a much more systematic analysis of the material, and concluded that ‘the capital letters E, H and K in the 1932 volume had striking dissimilarities to the same letters in authentic examples of Hitler’s writing.’5

  Hitler was one of the first people to decide to give up writing by hand. His handwriting, however, had some more life in it. The frightful saga of authentication over the forged diaries suggests that analysis of handwriting on a forensic basis is a much less accurate science than its proponents claim, as we’ll explore further in Chapter 20. Most of the graphologists employed by Stern couldn’t reliably tell the difference between a blatant forgery and the real thing, not even suggesting that there might be room for doubt here. When we come to the much stranger ‘science’ of character analysis through graphology, we might like to remember the failure to identify Hitler’s handwriting. If a professional analyst couldn’t tell the difference between a letter written by Hitler and one written by a cheap forger, is it at all likely that he will be able to diagnose Hitler’s political tendencies or character defects through the direction in which the letters lean?

  14 ~ Preparing the Boys for Death: The Invention of Italic

  One of the great things about going to university in Britain is that one leaves home: one meets people from a very wide range of backgrounds. Your eyes are opened a little bit. My very first day at university, I sat next to a boy who observed, when he saw what we were having for dinner, said ‘It’s strange to be eating chicken with a knife and fork, isn’t it?’ The next day, I met another boy, who said his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all gone to Christ Church, and it was a great shame in the family that he’d had to go to Lady Margaret Hall. His father, or perhaps mother, had decided to console him with a BMW with a personal numberplate, RTS 1, which sat opulently in the car park at the front of the college until the porters told Ralph to move the bloody thing, which they did on average twice a day. Possibly poor old knifeless David and personal-allowance Ralph found a suburban child of the middle classes, who had nothing but an enthusiasm for Dickens to recommend him, as exotic as I found them. Probably not, however: there were a lot more of us.

  One of the aspects that I found extraordinary and fascinating in the incredibly posh boys who already seemed to know their way around the place was the italic-influenced way some of them wrote:

  Now, the sort of state schools that I went to in the 1970s and early 1980s had a particular model of teaching handwriting, which I will come to. Our handwritings were different, and bore our own stamp, but there was a general style of writing which prevailed. It didn’t occur to me that anyone, in England in the 1980s, learned to write in any other way, unless they were doing an art project or something of that sort.

  I played the double bass at that time, an instrument which got me into all sorts of odd social situations. One of these was being invited to play in the pit band for a production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. The production was immense. The entire text was performed, probably for the first time since 1610. No professional would stand for it, and no audience (as it turned out) either. As the fifth act turned midnight into one o’clock, and the yawning staff of the playhouse prepared to berate us for keeping them up, the last stages of the monstrous comedy were accompanied by the dull, irregular thud of the tip-up seats, as the patrons decided, one after the other, that they’d probably got the point by now.

  The music was written especially for the play by a boy called Corin Buckeridge.* There was a cellist in the band, a posh boy with a cowpat of thick hair and an expensive jumper, with the curious name of Paul im Thurn – I discovered much later that his family were Swiss nobility, they lived in rather a grand mansion flat by Putney Bridge and there was a von and a zu that had dropped out at some point, for no very obvious reason. I rather hit it off with him. In those days – this was 1984 – there were no mobile phones and no Internet. You communicated, in Oxford, by means of small notes which were carted about the place by long-suffering university servants. You wrote the name of your correspondent and his college on a piece of paper, and it was taken to the other side of the university in a van, and deposited in their pigeon hole. I wonder whether the whole thing still goes on – it has an efficient, laborious, Trollopian air, all that twice-daily collecting of scribbled notes. Anyway, just before Volpone began to be inflicted on a paying public, I had a note from this im Thurn. What it said has been lost in the mists of time, but the style of the thing was unforgettable: triangular, oval, thick-and-thin pen strokes, meticulous down strokes and curving upstrokes. I had had my first encounter with a living italic hand. I didn’t know they still existed. ‘Oh, I learnt it at school,’ Paul im Thurn said when I asked him. ‘There was a master who was rather keen on it, and so a lot of us, we learnt it.’ ‘What school did you go to?’ I said – this was the question that, at Oxford in 1984, you generally didn’t ask. The whole question was just a little bit fraught. ‘Oh, it was a school called Ampleforth,’ he said. I looked uncomprehending. ‘It’s a sort of Catholic boarding school. You know the story of the Ampleforth headmaster who went to the conference of public-school hea
dmasters, and when one of them said, “Our role in life is to prepare our boys for life,” the Ampleforth headmaster said, “All very commendable, but we at Ampleforth see our role as preparing our boys for death.”’

  It’s probably very unfair, but ever since then, the italic hand has always given me the impression of being written by someone preparing for death.

  Almost every other revision of handwriting with large-scale ambitions – even Bickham, Spencer, and certainly Palmer and Vere Foster – wanted to simplify matters; to make letters easier to write for the penholder and more lucid for the reader. They wanted to speed things up, to shed unnecessary ornament, and, above all, to produce a hand suitable for contemporary commercial realities. The revival of the italic hand was consciously different. It was ornamental, elegant, produced and designed by people who in many ways were hostile to the world of commerce and efficiency. Moreover, it came not from a consideration of modern styles, but from historical analysis. It tried to go back three centuries, and do something memorable.