Fraktur revben rygg

It allowed for an easy distinction of catholic and protestant publications: The protestants printed German, using Fraktur, the Catholics printed Latin, using Antiqua types similar to the one used here.

For some printers the old Fraktur type wore out and it was replaced by Latin type because Fraktur types were scare. In western Canada the German language printing by Mennonites continued mostly in Fraktur. In its most decorative form it became a recognized form of folk art. For example in Hildebrand’s Zeittafel (Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Anabaptists in the German and Dutch speaking states also printed the majority of their early works in Fraktur. This typeface was to be more elegant than the boorish Schwabacher, more modern than the gothic Textura and yet distinctly “German” in that it should not incorporate elements of the Antiqua style typefaces that the humanist movement had just created in Italy based on ancient roman lettering, and which had become the rage of printing fashion south of the Alps.

The art form of Fraktur is described in a separate article in GAMEO. The computer, with its numerous available type fonts, has caused a small revival of Fraktur. The the vast majority of German language Mennonite works from Poland, Russia and Ukraine, United States, Canada and Latin America were printed with Fraktur type.

Mennonites from Europe, in an effort to preserve both their Germanic languages and culture, continued the use of Fraktur in their printing in all the places where they lived as long as the German language was primary.

In the 19th century the script became more pointed and angular, that is more straight up and down, and it lost some of the curved letter forms found in 18th century script. The Fraktur family of typefaces is part of a larger type family known in English as "Blackletter" and in German sometimes known popularly as "Gotisch" -- Gothic.

The language is German.

Folk life scholar Don Yoder confirms and explicates these observations.

Over the centuries Mennonite styles of handwriting have changed. Technically these are "Antiqua" typefaces. However, the influx of Mennonite immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s with their interest in advanced education revitalized German language Fraktur printing.

The Mennonite’s use of Fraktur type, and their reading of literature in Fraktur, influenced and positioned them on left side of these polarities much more than the right. Mennonites with a strong sense of literacy taught Fraktur as the common community script. Beginning in the 1950s this trend was compounded by the Canadian public education system which provided German language instruction as a foreign language with no reference to Fraktur type.

However, this stylistic change had little impact on North American or Russian Mennonite handwriting since few were schooled in Germany in the 20th century.

The introduction of typewriters in the late 19th century had a major impact on the use of Fraktur because typewriters with Fraktur fonts were almost unknown in North America.

After World War I Fraktur finally began to go out of style as German society became more cosmopolitan and open to international influences.