25 Pfennig, Stadt Gernrode am Harz, 1921

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.

Gernrode is a Harz resort built round one of the oldest churches in Germany: St. Cyriakus, founded in 959 and among the very few Ottonian buildings to survive more or less whole. The town styles itself Luftkurort on its own money - a climatic health resort, which is what it lived on once the mining stopped.