50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Kneitlingen, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00436
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
council: 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: 99 × 68.5 mm (±0.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Brunswick Till Eulenspiegel Low German

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Kneitlingen, 1921
Printer: Not established
Rarity: common

KneitlingenGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Claus Eulenspiegel and Anna Wiebken: Till's parents, named in the sixteenth-century chapbook. A village of this size printing a genealogy of a folk trickster is the whole Serienschein idea in one object.
The owl and the ape: The face has an owl and a long-tailed ape flanking the numeral - the owl for his name, the ape for what he was.
Günther Clausen: The same hand that drew the Eulenspiegel notes for the Braunschweig State Bank, twenty kilometres west. This collection holds both, so the artist can be followed from the state bank down to the birthplace village.

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.

Kneitlingen is a village of a few hundred people at the foot of the Elm, and it is where Till Eulenspiegel was born - about 1300, by the tradition the jest books record. The village's own note puts his parents on it: Claus Eulenspiegel and Anna Wiebken, sitting with the infant between them.

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

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