Berliner Street Signs
One of the pleasures of strolling the streets of another city is the discovery of visual quirks native to that spot. Berlin is one of my favourite places to play this game. There are lots of examples in Germany’s densely layered Hauptstadt, and exhibit A can be seen just about everywhere — it’s the striking form of the esszett as it appears on the city’s street signs.
The esszett (or scharfes S) is a character unique to German — it’s the one resembling a weird-looking “B”. The simplified version of the story is that it represents a double “S” ligature, specifically between the now-extinct “long s” (which you’ve undoubtedly noticed and pronounced as an “f” when perusing the Declaration of Independence) with a standard “s”. The esszett is used throughout the German language, but this particular form of it caught my eye because of its ubiquitous presence in the word for street: “Straße”, or “Strasse”.
This typographic mark’s history is long and a bit complex. It’s been represented in any number of variations, from its calligraphic origins as ink scratched onto parchment, through blackletter at the dawn of European printing, then finally bursting onto the international stage from Germany as a modern, streamlined typographic style in the 1920s.
Berlin’s street signs date from that golden, modern, serif-less age, an era dedicated to linking form to function, to divorcing itself from an antiquated, overwrought past. Letterforms became clean of line, rational, and geometric. Thank goodness it was (and is!) impossible for designers of any era to extricate themselves completely from environment and cultural context … that sharp-edged blackletter style still managed to creep in, and it’s nowhere more apparent than in this emphatically angular esszett.
The street signs vary on the eastern and western sides of Berlin, thanks to the forty years that the city spent divided, and this particular incarnation of the character is more often seen in the western part of the city. Berliner type designer Verena Gerlach has made a study of street signage on both sides of the city — the resulting typefaces (Berlin West, Berlin East) are well worth a look, and are available from Fontshop.com.
