75 Pfennig, Stadt Buttstädt, 1921
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00402
- Series year
- 1921
- Actually issued
- 1921
- council
- not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
- 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
- 110.5 × 70.1 mm (±1.6, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicThuringiaCattle marketTown history
The type
- Type
- 75 Pfennig, Stadt Buttstädt, 1921
- Printer
- Aug. Heinecke, Rudolstadt
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- The ox market of 1621
- Buttstädt's fair drew cattle from Hungary and Poland. The note dates the scene three hundred years back, to the year the town's own arms were granted.
- Justice with sword and scales
- The face shows a winged figure on the town arms, dated 1637 - the middle of the Thirty Years' War, when the fair would have been at its worst.
- Aug. Heinecke, Rudolstadt
- A Thuringian printer; the note is lithographed in five or six colours, which for seventy-five pfennig is extravagant.
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.
Buttstädt in Thuringia held one of the great cattle fairs of central Germany, and its seventy-five puts it on the money: a coloured prospect captioned Buttstädter Ochsenmarkt 1621, herds filling the field outside the town, drovers and riders among them.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 75 Pfennig, Stadt Buttstädt, 1921 in the collection.
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