Fraktur

Fraktur comes from Latin fractura, 'a breaking,' from frangere, 'to break.' The type is named for the way its curved strokes appear to fracture — to break and rejoin — rather than flowing continuously as in roman or humanist letterforms. Fraktur is a form of blackletter, the broad family of dense, angular scripts that medieval scribes used across northern Europe. German printing adopted blackletter type from its scribal models and never fully transitioned to the roman types that came to dominate Italian, French, and eventually English printing.

Fraktur as a specific typeface emerged around 1513, designed for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I's chancery. It was slightly less compressed than older blackletter styles, with distinctive letterforms: a split ascender on the lowercase d and h, a rounded lowercase e, and the characteristic broken curves throughout. Over the following centuries, Fraktur became the default German type, used for Luther's Bible translations, Goethe's first editions, and every official document of German-speaking governments. To read German in 1800 was to read Fraktur.

The typeface carried enormous cultural weight — and that weight made it a target for political manipulation. The Nazis initially promoted Fraktur as authentically German and explicitly rejected roman type as Jewish. Then in 1941, in a remarkable reversal, Martin Bormann issued an edict declaring Fraktur to be 'Schwabacher Jewish letters' and mandating the switch to roman type for all official documents — partly because roman was easier for populations in occupied territories to read. The typeface was weaponized twice in opposite directions by the same regime.

After 1945, Fraktur was so thoroughly associated with Nazism that German publishers largely abandoned it. It survived in newspaper mastheads, regional signage, and the tattoo traditions of American counterculture and Mexican-American communities, where the letterform took on new meanings entirely unconnected to its German history. Typographers have worked to reclaim Fraktur as a historical form rather than a political one — a typeface that is 400 years older than the ideology that temporarily colonized it.