his father's uncle Ludwig Traube was one of the founders of the discipline of palaeography. When he was around ten, Fraenkel contracted osteomyelitis. The life-threatening illness left his right arm deformed. From 1897 to 1906 Fraenkel attended the in the borough of Berlin-Tempelhof, where his teachers included the mythographer Otto Gruppe, whom Fraenkel credited in his doctoral thesis with inspiring his interest in classical antiquity. In spite of these leanings, he enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law, as antisemitic hiring conventions would have made it difficult to obtain a teaching position at a German university. During his time as a student of law, Fraenkel began to be mentored by the Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose lectures he attended in his own time. After a visit to Rome in late 1907, Fraenkel formally changed his degree subject to classical philology. In 1909, he transferred to the University of Göttingen to continue his studies under the Latinist Friedrich Leo and the linguist Jacob Wackernagel. In 1912, he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Roman comedy entitled ('Selected Studies on Middle and New Comedy'). Career in Germany Fraenkel's first academic appointment was in 1913 as an assistant at the , a lexicographical project based in Munich. After briefly working at a secondary school in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he began the process of habilitation in 1917 at the University of Berlin and began to teach there as an untenured lecturer, known in German as . In 1918, Fraenkel married Ruth von Velsen, a classical scholar who gave up her career to support him. They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom was the mathematician Edward Fraenkel. Having been promoted to an extraordinary professorship at Berlin in 1920, Fraenkel was appointed a full professor of Latin at the University of Kiel in 1923. His appointment followed the publication of a monograph on the Roman comedian Plautus which established his reputation in the discipline. In 1928, Fraenkel accepted an offer to return to the University of Göttingen. His three-year stint there was a difficult period for him and his family; his son Albert died from an illness and Fraenkel was subject to antisemitism in the context of what the classicist Gordon Williams described as "personal quarrels" within the faculty. In 1931, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Freiburg, where he experienced a fulfilling personal life and hoped