Both my grandparents studied German in college. My grandmother still had her old German books, and when I started studying the language, she gave them to me. Published in 1933 (and smelling pleasantly like it), they're full of fables, short tales of famous German speakers (Mozart, etc.), and other stories. They are printed in Fraktur, the German script which at the time was still in common usage. Having read the
Wikipedia article on the matter, I now know that in 1941 Fraktur was banned on the grounds that it was supposedly
Judenlettern, Jewish letters, and after World War II it was mostly abandoned in quest of modernization. It's not tremendously hard to read, though it takes some adjustment.
These books go in series from one to nine (though I'm missing number eight), and at the moment I'm reading bits of book two, which seems to be at about my level. Got to keep my hand in over the summer.
Both my grandparents studied German in college. My grandmother still had her old German books, and when I started studying the language, she gave them to me. Published in 1933 (and smelling pleasantly like it), they're full of fables, short tales of famous German speakers (Mozart, etc.), and other stories. They are printed in Fraktur, the German script which at the time was still in common usage. Having read the Wikipedia article on the matter, I now know that in 1941 Fraktur was banned on the grounds that it was supposedly Judenlettern, Jewish letters, and after World War II it was mostly abandoned in quest of modernization. It's not tremendously hard to read, though it takes some adjustment.
These books go in series from one to nine (though I'm missing number eight), and at the moment I'm reading bits of book two, which seems to be at about my level. Got to keep my hand in over the summer.
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