The high lightweight potential of fibre and in particular textile reinforced ceramics for high performance applications can only be used optimally, if the structural components as well as the composite material itself are designed according to the acting loads. The basic requirement for this purpose is the use of validated design and dimensioning concepts that primarily consider the failure and damage behaviour as well as the stress and deformation state. For many practical problems, the induced stresses can be calculated relatively well by means of existing analytical, numerical and experimental methods. In contrast, for the realistic description of the damage behaviour of ceramic composite structures, in particular for those with textile reinforcement, validated models barely exist.At the ILK, first physically reasonable failure criteria have been developed and successfully applied for fibre and textile reinforced ceramics. On the basis of extensive multi-axial fracture tests with unidirectional fibre reinforced ceramics, these novel fracture mode related failure criteria could be confirmed in the practically relevant (σ₂, τ₂₁)-stress-plane. Starting from the advanced fracture criteria, new approaches for the description of the failure behaviour of woven ceramic composites have been developed and verified. Thereby, it could be shown that such ceramic composites could be subdivided into two classes with respect to the failure behaviour. For the simulation of the anisotropic damage behaviour of textile reinforced ceramics, adapted material models have been developed at the ILK. These models realistically describe the different fracture modes as well as the anisotropic damage phenomena under consideration of the existing textile architecture, the matrix system and the fibre-matrix-interface.