Reading the 1775 page
The type on these pages can look impossibly old. It was not old to the people who received the letters. To a ribbon-weaver in Mülheim in 1749, this was simply what German looked like — and roman type, the letterforms you are reading now, was the foreign-looking one, reserved for Latin and for words borrowed from abroad.
That convention is visible in Tersteegen’s own letters. German printers set German in Fraktur and switched to roman for loanwords, often inside a single sentence — a built-in way of marking a word as foreign, doing the work English now gives to italics. In Brief 127 the words Courage! and Surface stand in roman inside the Fraktur (the leaf spells the second one Surfaçe, cedilla and all); Brief 119 does the same with particulier, and Brief 126 with Dispositionen.
The long ſ
The character that stops most modern readers is ſ, which looks like an f with half its crossbar missing — because that is roughly what it is. It follows a rule rather than a whim: ſ at the beginning or middle of a word, round s at the end. So the page reads ſanfte Einſchlafen unſers, but aus and das. Once that clicks, a page that looked like a wall of thorns turns into German.
Schwabacher — the italic before italics
Look at the argument line and the epigraph on the page shown on the about page: they are rounder and wider than the body beneath them. That is Schwabacher, an older blackletter which by the 1770s survived mostly as the emphasis face inside Fraktur — blackletter’s italic. It is why the English translation carries no italics at those points: the emphasis is recorded in the editorial apparatus and left out of the reader’s text, so that a modern italic never silently claims to be Tersteegen’s.
Versalien
Divine names are set in capitals — GOtt, JEsus, HErr — and at moments of weight the compositor spaced them out across the line: G O T T. The apparatus logs each occurrence and which form it took; the reader’s text renders them as ordinary capitals, so that the English says what the German says without shouting where it did not.
Who was reading this
Tersteegen wrote to weavers, ribbon-makers, shopkeepers, servants, the sick and the dying. He was a ribbon-weaver himself. The Reformed and Lutheran worlds he moved in pressed hard for lay reading, on the conviction that Scripture was to be read by the person it was addressed to, and the letters are their own evidence: he wrote at length, expecting to be understood, to people who worked with their hands. What was hard for them was not the alphabet. It was, as the letters keep saying, the thing the alphabet was pointing at.
Why it looks so old to us
Fraktur remained ordinary German printing far later than most English readers assume — into the twentieth century, and standard until 1941, when the Nazi government abolished it by decree on the fabricated pretext that it was Jewish in origin. German printing moved to roman type within about a year. The break was abrupt and recent, which is much of why these pages now feel remote: not because the type is unreadably ancient, but because a whole tradition of reading it was cut off inside living memory.
Can a German read it today?
Yes — with about the effort an English speaker brings to the King James Bible, and with the same kind of trap waiting.
The script is a matter of speed rather than comprehension: Fraktur is the same alphabet in unfamiliar clothes, and a modern reader who sits with it for twenty minutes begins to move. What makes it strange is only that no one schooled after 1941 was taught it. Handwriting is the harsher case — eighteenth-century German Kurrent is genuinely opaque to most readers now, which is part of what makes a scholarly transcription of the surviving autograph letters such valuable work.
The language itself is readable, though it announces its age on every line: Tersteegen writes seyn for sein, thun for tun, Werck for Werk, Gebät for Gebet. German spelling was not standardized until 1901, so his page looks older to a German eye than English of the same decade looks to us.
The real difficulty is the words that have quietly changed sides. Tersteegen uses Vorwurf in its older sense — the object on which the mind is set, from the Latin ob-iectum. In modern German the word means reproach, and means nothing else. So a fluent reader today meets this line in Brief 114 —
GOtt selbst will hinführo nur dein Vorwurf seyn
— and reads God wants henceforth to be only your reproach, when Tersteegen wrote that God intends to be the one object of his friend’s attention: He will be everything to you, and all the rest shall be to you as nothing. Nearly the reverse of the sentence, and nothing signals the error. It is the difficulty of reading “prevent” or “conversation” in the King James Bible, where the familiar word is the wrong one. Elend and Gelassenheit carry the same risk.
So a scholar of the period reads these letters comfortably; an educated German reader today reads them slowly, understands most of it, and is now and then invisibly wrong. Which is much of why the work of an edition is not only carrying the words into another language, but deciding, line by line, what they meant to the man who wrote them.