50 Pfennig, Stadt Preetz, 1921 (church street)
Notgeld der Stadt Preetz in Holstein
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00202
- Series year
- 1921
- Actually issued
- 1921
- Signatures
- This issue carries no bank manager or cashier signature.
- Grade
- UNC (IBNS)
As issued; bright colour, sharp corners. Estimated from the archival scan. Folds, soiling and edge condition are visible at this resolution; paper crispness, pinholes, small repairs and pressing are not. Originally catalogued as Schoenau from a mis-detected crop; the recropped obverse reads 'Preetzer Notgeld'.
- Estimated value
- $10 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
- Dimensions
- 109.1 × 70.6 mm (±0.7, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinHolsteinWeimar RepublicTown view
The type
- Type
- 50 Pfennig, Stadt Preetz, 1921 (church street)
- Printer
- Not established
- Rarity
- common
Inscriptions
50 Preetzer Notgeld.
Fifty pfennig of Preetz emergency money.
Preetz in Holstein. Fuenfzig Pfennig. Der Magistrat. April 1921.
Preetz in Holstein. Fifty pfennig. The town council. April 1921.
Symbology
- Church-tower street
- The pictorial face of this sheet: a Preetz street beneath the town church tower, timber houses with steep red-tiled roofs. Each note in the set carries a different local view - the picture is the point, not the denomination.
- Artist's signature (A. Goetting)
- Signed in the plate at lower right. The six scenes of the Preetz set were drawn by more than one hand; this one is Goetting's, which is what distinguishes it from its sister notes.
- Swan arms and knotwork "50"
- The reverse carries the town's swan shield and a large "50" set in antiquarian interlace rather than security guilloche - a north-German Notgeld taste that has nothing to do with forgery.
- Expiry wording
- Like almost every Serienschein it states that it lapses a month after being called in - emergency money designed from the outset to stop being money.
What was happening
Notgeld - "emergency money". German towns, districts and firms began printing their own small change in 1914, when metal coin vanished into hoards, and did not really stop until the 1923 stabilisation.
What began as necessity became a craze. By 1921 municipalities were commissioning Serienscheine: beautifully lithographed series aimed squarely at collectors, printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with local legends, landmarks and jokes in dialect. Selling them to collectors was itself a way of raising money - the town took real marks for paper it hoped would never be redeemed.
Preetz, a small Holstein town east of Kiel grown up around a Benedictine nunnery, issued a set of six 50-Pfennig notes in April 1921, each carrying a different view of the place. This one shows a street under the tower of the town church, a run of steep red-tiled roofs falling away toward the foreground - a quiet townscape drawn in flat lithographic colour and signed in the plate by the artist A. Goetting. The reverse is given over to a large interlaced "50" with the town's swan arms, the denomination spelled out, and the usual clause that the note lapses once the town calls it in.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Stadt Preetz, 1921 (church street) in the collection.
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