Der Kleine Prinz — in German, written in Fraktur.
Fraktur, whose very name comes from the Latin fractura, a break, sits at the ornate, angular end of the broader blackletter family, sometimes called gebrochene Schrift, broken script, on account of its sharp, splintered curves compared to the rounded letterforms of Antiqua, the Roman type that Renaissance humanists in Italy had revived from ancient inscriptions and Carolingian manuscripts. It was not an organic medieval survival but a deliberate commission: around 1513 to 1517, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I had the typeface developed in Nuremberg for a set of lavish printed books celebrating his own life and chivalric ideals, most famously the poem Theuerdank, and from that courtly beginning Fraktur went on to become the standard typeface for German language printing for close to four hundred years, gradually displacing its slightly rounder, older cousin Schwabacher, and quite distinct from the entirely separate cursive handwriting script Sütterlin, devised only in 1911 and often mistakenly lumped together with Fraktur by outsiders even though the two belong to different centuries and different purposes, one for the printing press, the other for the schoolroom exercise book.
What makes Fraktur genuinely fascinating, well beyond its letterforms, is the extraordinary cultural weight German speakers came to attach to it. For roughly two centuries a running argument, sometimes called the Antiqua Fraktur Streit, pitted Fraktur as the supposedly authentic, native German script against Antiqua as the script of cosmopolitan science, classical learning, and international exchange, a dispute intense enough that individual scholars, publishers, and eventually political movements picked sides, with figures such as Jacob Grimm arguing for Antiqua on the grounds that Fraktur was a relatively late Renaissance invention rather than any genuine ancient German inheritance. In everyday German printing this tension produced a strikingly visible compromise: for centuries a single page might set ordinary German words in Fraktur while switching seamlessly into Antiqua for Latin phrases, scientific terms, and foreign loanwords, so that a reader’s eye could tell, at a glance, which words the language considered properly its own and which it still regarded as borrowed. Fraktur’s nationalist associations only deepened through the nineteenth century, which makes its ending so abrupt and so strange: in January 1941 the Nazi regime suddenly banned it by internal decree, the Normalschrifterlass, justifying the ban with the invented claim that Fraktur was really Schwabacher Judenlettern, Jewish letters, a fabricated pretext covering what were almost certainly far more practical wartime motives, chiefly the need for a typeface legible and available across occupied Europe.
Fraktur’s deeper uniqueness only becomes clear once set against the wider European picture. Blackletter of one kind or another had originally been the printed script of the entire West, Gutenberg’s own Bible included, before nearly every other European language quietly abandoned it for Antiqua across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving German speaking Central Europe, along with Denmark and Norway for a time under German typographic influence, as the last major linguistic community in Europe still printing its everyday literature in blackletter well into the twentieth century. The script even found an unexpected second life across the Atlantic, where German speaking settlers in colonial and early republican Pennsylvania developed Fraktur into a beloved folk art tradition entirely of its own, hand lettering and illuminating birth certificates, the Geburtsschein, alongside baptismal and marriage records in richly painted borders, a warm domestic afterlife utterly removed from the imperial courts and nationalist newspapers that had once fought so fiercely over the same letters. Today Fraktur survives mostly as ornament and nostalgia, gracing beer labels, a handful of newspaper mastheads, and, rather unexpectedly, the logos of heavy metal bands the world over, most of whom would likely be startled to learn just how much political and cultural argument once hung on those broken, angular strokes.
