From the ‘authentically German’ typography used by the Nazis, to the ‘boogying Octopuss’ lettering of the late 70s, the fonts of Berlin’s transport system articulate the chequered past of Germany’s capital

When the Estonian graphic designer Anton Koovit first arrived in Berlin in 2005, he did what most tourists do when they get to the German capital: he got lost at Alexanderplatz station. Berlin’s public transport system has had a standardised signage typeface called “Transit” in use since the mid-90s, but its application is erratic. Fonts differ between lines, sometimes between stations on the same line, and in a couple of instances even between platforms at the same station. At Alexanderplatz, where long-distance railways intersect with local overground trains and three separate subway lines, getting lost is par for the course, even for Berliners.



Yet in Koovit’s case, it turned out to be a blessing. He boarded the U8 line which cuts vertically across the city and fell in love with the font he discovered on the signs at the stops: a grotesque sans serif with a close resemblance to the New Johnston font in use on the London Underground since 1916, yet somehow with more a “thought through” feel. Koovit calls it a “funny yet deeply serious font”. Some of the letters look like they’ve been sandpapered off with modernist zeal: the lower-case t is a simple cross. Others are higgledy-piggledy: the lower-case a’s, for example, look different at each stop.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sign on the U8 line uses the deeply idiosyncratic Octopuss font. Photograph: Jon Worth

When Koovit finally arrived at his original destination, he did some research and found not only that the design community was picking its brains over the origins of the U8 typeface – “Neuzeit Grotesk” and “Wiener Rundblock” were some of the names bandied about on forums – but also that no one had bothered to digitise the font since the U8 line was built at the time of the first world war. After research that nearly resulted in an entire PhD, Koovit’s homage to the U8 is now for sale via his website. “It was like an odd mix of archeology and trainspotting”, he says. “Given that it was so heavily bombed in the second world war, Berlin can look like most other European cities above ground. But under the surface there is all this amazing history”.

The quirky station signs at Berlin’s 81 listed subway stations are as easy to overlook on a first visit as they are hard to ignore once one has developed an eye for them. Each font spells out its own history of the city. If the U8’s avant-garde modernism seems a good fit for the graphic designers and fashionistas that now frequent the line on their way to trendy Neukölln, other station signs still hark back to the capital’s authoritarian past.

At Berlin Wannsee, site of the conference that resulted in the “final solution”, blackletter flashes past like memories of a nightmare. At Anhalter Bahnhof, a sign in Tannenberg-Fraktur – a supposedly authentically German font once heavily used by the Nazis – is a reminder that the before wartime bombings, this was once one of the most important railway stations in the city.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Fehrbelliner Platz sign on the U3. Photograph: BVG Archive

Some of the signs and stations have a grandeur in keeping with the swagger of the Wilhelmine era: many of the stops on the U3 line, opened in 1913, are built in a neoclassical style with stuccoed walls, period columns and mosaic station signs that spell out the names in confident capitals.



Yet incongruity is part of the game. At Fehrbelliner Platz the mosaics hang only a few metres away from another sign spelling out the same stop in late 70s Helvetica, on a backdrop of brown and orange. At Wittenbergplatz, one of the three platforms has a station sign in the style of the London Underground, gifted to the station by a British city commander in 1952.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Konstanzer Strasse on the U7, using Helvetica. Photograph: Jon Worth/Flickr

Sometimes fonts seem to hint at their line’s temperament. On the U6, a line once dotted with “ghost stations” closed during the GDR era, there are still some stops which look lost in time, such as Platz der Luftbrücke or Naturkundemuseum, their names spelled out in wobbly handcarved fonts.

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On the U7, which snakes coyly along Berlin’s underbelly as if to deliberately avoid the major intersections, the station signs are written in workmanlike Helvetica, the standard subway font across the world: you could be in New York, Vienna, Stockholm, or anywhere.

For contrast, there’s Pankstrasse on the U8: built in 1977 just a couple of hundred metres south of where the Berlin wall used to run, it was constructed to be used as a shelter in case of a nuclear war, with its own emergency kitchen and a filtered ventilation system. But the deeply idiosyncratic Octopuss font on the station sign is a reminder that ‘77 was also the year of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Saturday Night Fever: the end of the world may have been nigh, but one corner of Berlin was boogying the night away to uphold western civilisation.