Antiqua-Fraktur dispute

The Antiqua–Fraktur dispute was a typographical dispute in 19th- and early 20th-century Germany.

In most European countries, blackletter typefaces like the German Fraktur were displaced with the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 15th and 16th centuries. However, in Germany, both typefaces coexisted until the first half of the 20th century.

During that time, both typefaces gained ideological connotations in Germany, which led to long and heated disputes on what was the "correct" typeface to use. The eventual outcome was that the Antiqua-type fonts won, when the Nazi party chose to phase out the more ornate-looking Fraktur.

Historically, the dispute originates in the differing use of these two typefaces in most intellectual texts—for Latin texts, Antiqua-type typefaces were normally used, whereas Fraktur was favoured for works written in German. This extended even to English–German dictionaries, for example, where the English words were all written in Antiqua and the German words in Fraktur. Originally this was simply a convention.

Conflict over the two typefaces first came to a head after the occupation of Germany and dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon in 1806, which led to a period in the history of Germany in which nationalists began to attempt to define what cultural values were common to all Germans. There was a massive effort to canonize the German national literature—for example the Grimm Brothers' collection of fairy tales—and to create a unified German grammar.

In the context of these debates, the two typefaces became increasingly polarized: Antiqua typefaces were seen to be "un-German", and they were seen to represent this by virtue of their connotations as "shallow", "light", and "not serious". In contrast, Fraktur, with its much darker and denser script, was viewed as representing the allegedly German virtues such as depth and sobriety.

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