5 Pfennig, Carl Ouden, Lassan-Zinnowitz
Carl Ouden, Manufaktur- u. Modewaren, Lassan-Zinnowitz
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00449
- Serial
- B 1258
- Series year
- 1920
- Actually issued
- 1920
- Signatures
- This issue carries no bank manager or cashier signature.
- Grade
- VF (IBNS)
Circulated: soiling and rounded corners, as shop scrip usually is. 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
- $3 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
- Dimensions
- 51.5 × 41.7 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicPomeraniaPrivate issueShop scrip
The type
- Type
- 5 Pfennig, Carl Ouden, Lassan-Zinnowitz
- Printer
- Not established
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- Series letters
- B on the five, D on the one, with a serial beneath. Even a draper numbered his paper.
- Two shops, one currency
- Lassan and Zinnowitz are twenty-five kilometres apart across the Peenestrom. The voucher was good in both, which made it useful to a summer visitor.
- A pink lithograph
- One colour and a border of printer's ornament. There is no picture anywhere on it: this is money to be spent, not collected.
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.
Not a town at all: a draper. Carl Ouden sold Manufaktur- und Modewaren - fabrics and fashion goods - in Lassan on the Peene and in the seaside resort of Zinnowitz on Usedom, and issued his own numbered vouchers in five-pfennig and one-pfennig denominations.
Shop scrip of this kind is the most ordinary and least collected end of Notgeld. A shopkeeper could not make change either, and a voucher good only in his own two shops cost him nothing to print and kept the customer coming back.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 5 Pfennig, Carl Ouden, Lassan-Zinnowitz in the collection.
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