The behaviour does not seem to be caused by any setting in my init  
file. Or the system's. The former I proved my saving my .emacs file  
under a different name and by 'touch ~/.emacs', creating an empty init  
file. The latter I proved by simply saving site-start.el under a  
different name.

GNU Emacs then shows a welcome message with GNU Emacs logo, a few  
hyper-links to documentation, and below a red text on the left side  
the start of the fringe – which is already distorted. The mode-line  
also does not show legible text. See the attached screen shot.