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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 by the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 15th and 16th centuries. However, in Germany and Austria, the two styles of printing coexisted until the first half of the 20th century.
During that time, both styles 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-style typefaces prevailed when the Nazi Party chose to put an end to the use of Fraktur in favor of "normal typeface" ( German : Normalschrifterlaß ).
Historically, the dispute originates in the differing use of these two typefaces in most intellectual texts. Whereas Fraktur was preferred for works written in German, for Latin texts the Antiqua-style typefaces were normally used. This extended even to English–German dictionaries; the English words would all be written in Antiqua, and the German words in Fraktur. Originally this was simply a convention.
Conflict over the two typeface styles 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 cultural values 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 styles became increasingly polarized: Antiqua typefaces were seen as "un-German", and using them took on connotations of "shallow", "light", and "not serious". In contrast, Fraktur, with its much darker and denser script, was viewed as representing allegedly German virtues such as depth and sobriety.