50 Pfennig, Stadt Arnstadt, the siege of 1342

Notgeld der Stadt Arnstadt

Reverse of 50 Pfennig, Stadt Arnstadt, the siege of 1342 — Reverse 600 dpi

This copy

Accession: OM-00394
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
magistrate: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
Grade: UNC (IBNS)
As issued: full body, square corners, bright unfaded ink and no fold through the design. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which shows folds, soiling and edge condition but not paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $10 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 104.2 × 74.3 mm (±1.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Thuringia A. Paul Weber Weimar Republic

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Stadt Arnstadt, the siege of 1342
Printer: Not established; the design is signed A. Paul Weber
Rarity: common

ArnstadtGermany, 1920 borders

Inscriptions

Obverse - the terms

Notgeld der Stadt Arnstadt. Gueltig bis 1 Monat nach Aufruf. Der Magistrat. 1921.

Emergency money of the town of Arnstadt. Valid until one month after the call. The magistrate. 1921.

Symbology

1342, the unsuccessful siege: Erfurt, forty kilometres away and far larger, besieged Arnstadt in 1342 and failed. Six centuries later the town was still pleased enough about it to put the failure on its money.
Blue, not red: The fifty breaks from the red of the ten-Pfennig notes, which is how the set signals that this one is not part of the running satire.
The armoured flankers: Two men-at-arms stand in narrow side panels holding the central scene between them - a triptych arrangement Weber used to make a small note feel like an altarpiece.
A. Paul Weber: Signed A PAUL WEBER across the foot of the face and APW on the back. Weber (1893-1980) was born in Arnstadt; this is very early work, and the crowded grotesques and the black humour about hanging are already unmistakably his.
A verse that runs across the set: The border text does not finish on any one note. It carries over from one to the next, so the satire only reads in full if you own the whole series - which is, of course, the point of selling a series.
One red ink: Printed in a single red on cream, the numeral knocked through in black. Weber's line does all the work.

What was happening

Notgeld began in 1914 out of necessity: 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. The shortage was easing but the collector market was not, and a town could take real marks for paper it hoped would never be presented. So the municipalities commissioned Serienscheine: lithographed sets, printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of - a legend, a famous son, a battle, a joke 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.

Arnstadt's set is by A. Paul Weber, born in the town in 1893 and later the most unsettling German satirical draughtsman of his century - the lithographer of Das Verhängnis, arrested by the Gestapo in 1937, still working into the 1970s. In 1921 he was twenty-eight, and this is his own town's money.

It is not decorative. Each ten-Pfennig note shows two grotesques doing business - a beaked, hunched creature and a sack-laden burgher - and a verse runs right round the border, continuing from note to note across the set, on hoarding and usury and what used to be done about it:

Diese Brut kennst du, mein Lieber: es sind Wucherer und Schieber. Früher wurden sie an den Galgen gehoben, heute wird ruhig weitergeschoben.

You know this brood, my dear: they are usurers and profiteers. They used to be strung up on the gallows; today the shoving carries quietly on. A town put that on its own currency, in the year the currency started to die.

The fifty leaves the satire alone. It is printed in blue rather than red, and its reverse is a three-panel history painting: two armoured men flanking a scene of the town under attack, captioned 1342 - erfolglose Belagerung Arnstadts durch die Erfurter, the unsuccessful siege of Arnstadt by the men of Erfurt.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Stadt Arnstadt, the siege of 1342 in the collection.

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