½ Mark, Stadt Glauchau, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00417
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
council: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
Grade: AU (IBNS)
Bright; light edge toning. About uncurrent: bright and unfolded, with light handling - a corner bump or a faint edge tone. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which cannot show paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $8 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 98.4 × 72.2 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Saxony Silhouette Devils

The type

Type: ½ Mark, Stadt Glauchau, 1921
Printer: Ratsdruckerei R. Dulce, Glauchau
Rarity: common

GlauchauGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

A half-Mark denomination: Written as ½ Mark rather than 50 Pfennig, which is a printer's choice and a sign of where the currency was heading.
Devils over the town: Scene 3 of a set. German Notgeld is full of devils in 1921, and they are almost never theological - they stand for whatever the town wants to blame.
Ratsdruckerei R. Dulce: The house that printed a great deal of the best Notgeld in this collection, here printing its own town's.

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.

Glauchau in Saxony was the home of the Ratsdruckerei R. Dulce, which printed Notgeld for towns all over Germany - Herne's and Auerbach's among them. Its own note is a silhouette: two horned devils either side of a church tower, a crowd of small figures beneath, and the line dem ward des Schmutzes mal zu viel - one of them had had enough of the filth.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every ½ Mark, Stadt Glauchau, 1921 in the collection.

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