10 Pfennig, Stadt Lauchstädt, 1919

This copy

Accession: OM-00451
Series year: 1919
Actually issued: 1919
magistrate: 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: 76.4 × 52.2 mm (±1.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Saxony-Anhalt Theatre Spa town

The type

Type: 10 Pfennig, Stadt Lauchstädt, 1919
Printer: Adolf Forker, Leipzig
Rarity: common

LauchstädtGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Goethe's theatre: The Historisches Kurtheater of 1802 still stands and still plays. Lauchstädt's whole claim on the world is a wooden playhouse in a garden.
1919: One of the earlier notes in this group, from the year the republic was founded.
Adolf Forker, Leipzig: Printed thirty kilometres east, in the city that supplied most of Saxony's jobbing lithography.

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.

Bad Lauchstädt was the summer spa of the Saxon court and the place Goethe (1749–1832) built a theatre for in 1802, running it himself for the Weimar company. The 1919 note shows the town's buildings in a pink and black lithograph, the magistrate's arms above.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 10 Pfennig, Stadt Lauchstädt, 1919 in the collection.

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