Graphic artist Ludwig Sütterlin was commissioned by the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture (Preußisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung) to create a modern handwriting script in 1911.

The Sütterlin scripts were introduced in Prussia in 1915 and from the 1920s onwards they began to replace the relatively similar old German handwriting (Kurrent) in schools.

The Nazi Party banned all "broken" blackletter typefaces in 1941, which were seen as chaotic, including Sütterlin, and replaced them with Latin-type letters such as Antiqua.

It includes the long s (ſ) as well as several standard ligatures such as ff (f-f), ſt (ſ-t), st (s-t), and ß (ſ-z or ſ-s).

The Sütterlin lower-case 'e' contains two vertical bars close together, in which the origin of the umlaut diacritic (¨) from a small 'e' written above the modified vowel can be seen.