Krimhilde: Futura meets blackletter

The immense success of the New Typography movement—coupled with the commercial triumph of geometric sans-serif fonts like Futura—encouraged German foundries and type designers to explore how the trend could be applied to the traditional blackletter style, a category still widely used in Germany at the time. It simply needed a modern look suitable for advertising and other common uses.

A direct example was Krimhilde, designed by Albert Auspurg and released by Ludwig & Mayer in 1933. It borrowed features from the geometric sans-serif category while retaining distinct elements of German fraktur design, especially in the uppercase characters.

The foundry’s description clearly echoed the principles of the New Typography movement—without naming it explicitly.

The German typeface of our time must express a will toward pragmatism and, with an emphasis on the essential, present each letter in its most concise form. […] Therefore, in creating our new German typeface, we have deliberately refrained from reproducing the strokes and pressure of the writing pen. We have instead based this new German typeface on the fundamental idea of the sans serif typeface—uniform stroke weight—and have thus created a fraktur typeface that must be called practical, functional, and, in the best sense of the word, modern.