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Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly visible, and often emphasized; in this way it is often contrasted with the curves of the Antiqua (common) typefaces where the letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion. The word "Fraktur" derives from Latin frāctūra ("a break"), built from frāctus, passive participle of frangere ("to break"), which is also the root for the English word "fracture". In non-professional contexts, the term "Fraktur" is sometimes misused to refer to all blackletter typefaces while Fraktur typefaces do fall under that category, not all blackletter typefaces exhibit the Fraktur characteristics described above.
Fraktur is often characterized as "the German typeface", as it remained popular in Germany and much of Eastern Europe far longer than elsewhere. Beginning in the 19th century, the use of Fraktur versus Antiqua (seen as modern) was the subject of controversy in Germany. The Antiqua–Fraktur dispute continued until 1941, when the Nazi Germany banned Fraktur typefaces. After Nazi Germany fell in 1945, Fraktur was unbanned, but it failed to regain widespread popularity.
One difference between the Fraktur and other blackletter scripts is that in the lower case , the left part of the bow is broken, but the right part is not. In Danish texts composed in Fraktur, the letter was already preferred to the German and Swedish in the 16th century.
In the Latvian variant of Fraktur, used mainly until the 1920s, there are additional characters used to denote Latvian letters with Diacritic. Stroked letters , , , , are used for palatalized consonants (, , , , ), stroked variants of and distinguish voiced and unvoiced sibilants or affricates ( for voiced z, for unvoiced s, ž / š, dž / č), while accents (, , , , , ) together with digraphs (, etc.) are used for long vowels (, , , , ). Stroked variants of are also used in pre-1950 Sorbian orthography.
Fraktur quickly overtook the earlier Schwabacher and Textualis typefaces in popularity, and a wide variety of Fraktur fonts were carved and became common in the German-speaking world and areas under German influence (Scandinavia, Estonia, Latvia, Central Europe). In the 18th century, the German Theuerdank Fraktur was further developed by the Leipzig typographer Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf to create the typeset Breitkopf Fraktur. While over the succeeding centuries, most Central Europeans switched to Antiqua, German speakers remained a notable holdout.
From the late 18th century to the late 19th century, Fraktur was progressively replaced by Antiqua as a symbol of the classicist age and emerging cosmopolitanism in most of the countries in Europe that had previously used Fraktur. This move was hotly debated in Germany, a controversy known as the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. The shift affected mostly scientific writing in Germany, whereas most belletristic literature and newspapers continued to be printed in Fraktur.
The Fraktur typefaces remained in use in Nazi Germany, when they were initially represented as true German script; official Nazi documents and letterheads employed the font, and the cover of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf used a hand-drawn version of it. However, more modernized fonts of the type such as Tannenberg were in fact the most popular typefaces in Nazi Germany, especially for running text as opposed to decorative uses such as in titles. These fonts were designed in the early 20th century, mainly the 1930s, as grotesque versions of blackletter typefaces. The Nazis heavily used these fonts themselves, although the shift remained controversial; in fact, the press was at times scolded for its frequent use of "Roman characters" under "Jewish influence" and German émigrés were urged to use only "German script". On 3 January 1941, the Nazi Party ended this controversy by switching to international scripts such as Antiqua. Martin Bormann issued a circular (the "normal type decree") to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use. German historian Albert Kapr has speculated that the regime viewed Fraktur as inhibiting communication in the occupied territories during World War II.
The Reichsgesetzblatt used Fraktur until the end of 1941.
There are, however, two sets of Fraktur symbols in the of Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, and Latin Extended-E. The long s, ß, and the umlauted vowels are not encoded, as the characters are meant to be used in mathematics and phonetics, so they are not suitable for typesetting German-language texts.
For traditional implementations (pdfTeX and older), the command defined in the , or package is available. This command does not use Unicode to typeset letters in fraktur: it has its own method.
For example, produces . Or, in a real example,
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