1 Mark, Stadt Brakel, 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.

Brakel is a small town in the Warburg country of eastern Westphalia, and its set is written almost entirely in Low German. The 75 Pfennig carries a boast in verse - O Brakel du bist erenprys, wo fündt men dynes glyken? In Deutschland so ne Stad ni is, se mött dy alle wyken: Brakel, you are the prize, where would one find your like? There is no such town in Germany, they must all give way to you.

It is a joke. Brakel is the town of Das Mädchen von Brakel, the Grimms' shortest and most deadpan tale, in which a girl prays to St Anne for a husband, a boy hiding behind the altar answers in a booming voice that she will not get one, and she shouts back that the statue is talking nonsense and to let the mother speak. The town has been laughing at itself for two centuries and prints the evidence on its money.

This is the 1 Mark; its reverse shows a scene from Dat Maeken von Brakel - a girl kneeling at the altar of St Anne while a boy hides behind it - with the tale set out in Low German either side.