50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Dassow, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00405
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
council_1: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
council_2: 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: 87.1 × 61.7 mm (±1.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Mecklenburg Heraldry

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Dassow, 1921
Printer: Gebrüder Borchers, Lübeck
Rarity: common

DassowGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

The arms of the von Dassow: Chequered red and white with a lion, crested by a man in the same chequer. A village printing the arms of the family it was named after, five centuries after they mattered.
The church on the face: A red-roofed church above a field, framed in a border of coloured dots - the whole of the village's skyline.
Gebrüder Borchers, Lübeck: Printed in the Hanseatic city forty kilometres west, which is where Dassow's trade went.

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.

Dassow is a village on an inlet of the Baltic in Mecklenburg. Its note is heraldic rather than topographical: the arms of the von Dassow family, with the note that they were also called Pertzowe, drawn full achievement with mantling and crest.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Dassow, 1921 in the collection.

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