50 Pfennig, Stadt Hachenburg, 1921

Notgeld began in 1914 as necessity: silver and nickel coin vanished into hoards within weeks of mobilisation, and towns printed their own small change because the Reichsbank could not supply enough.

By 1920 it had become something else entirely. The shortage was easing, but the market for the notes was not - collectors would pay well above face value for a complete set, and a town could take real marks for paper it hoped would never come back to be redeemed. So the municipalities commissioned Serienscheine: lithographed series, four or six or ten notes to a set, printed far beyond any local need and illustrated with whatever the place was proud of. Local legends, famous sons, battles, saints, jokes in dialect.

The result is the most inventive body of graphic design in the history of paper money, made by places with a few thousand inhabitants, in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Hachenburg is a small town in the Westerwald, north of Koblenz, with a market square, a baroque schloss and the Cistercian abbey of Marienstatt in the valley below it. Its notes are dated 1 June 1921, numbered, signed by two magistrates, and printed by G. Hunckel of Bremen - a long way from the Westerwald, which tells you these were commissioned as a set rather than run off locally.

The redemption clause is unusually specific about how the town would call them in: the notice would appear in the Westerwälder Zeitung, and the note died a month later.

This is the 50 Pfennig; one face shows the Cistercian abbey of Marienstatt in its wooded valley, cut in fine black line, captioned Cistercienser-Abtei Marienstatt bei Hachenburg.