5 Pfennig, Stadt Gifhorn, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00416
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
mayor: 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: 75.1 × 50.1 mm (±1.1, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Lower Saxony Goethe Agriculture

The type

Type: 5 Pfennig, Stadt Gifhorn, 1921
Printer: Druckerei Appelhans, Braunschweig
Rarity: common

GifhornGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Goethe on a five-pfennig note: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The line is Faust's, and in 1921 it reads as an instruction to a country that had inherited a ruin.
The plough and the sunburst: The reverse shows a plough and harrow lying in a field under rays - farming as the answer the quotation implies.
Five Pfennig: Among the smallest denominations issued by a German town, and a sign of how completely copper had gone.

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.

Gifhorn's five-Pfennig note quotes Faust: was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen - what you have inherited from your fathers, earn it in order to possess it. Beneath it a man sits in a field of rye watching a partridge.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 5 Pfennig, Stadt Gifhorn, 1921 in the collection.

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