75 Pfennig, Stadt Hessisch Oldendorf, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00422
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: 87.7 × 63.3 mm (±0.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Lower Saxony Weser Legend

The type

Type: 75 Pfennig, Stadt Hessisch Oldendorf, 1921
Printer: Edler & Krische, Hannover
Rarity: common

Hessisch OldendorfGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Der Hohenstein: The reverse is the crag above the town seen from the Totental, with the Blutbach - the blood- brook - running below it.
The sieve on the well: A common motif in German banishing legends: the trapped spirit cannot pass a sieve until every hole is counted, which takes for ever.
Rudolf Hillebrecht: Credited on the face as the designer. A different Rudolf Hillebrecht later rebuilt Hannover after 1945; this is not him.

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.

Hessisch Oldendorf on the Weser tells a banishing story: the townspeople drove the devil into the Totental, the valley of the dead, and into a well with a sieve over it, to be released only when a hard winter turns all the water to ice - whereupon he strikes his hour of freedom, returns as a spectre to his old lodging, and the whole thing begins again.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 75 Pfennig, Stadt Hessisch Oldendorf, 1921 in the collection.

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