75 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 1921
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00457
- 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
- 91.4 × 70.3 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicBrandenburgPrignitzCastle
The type
- Type
- 75 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 1921
- Printer
- Gebr. Parcus, München
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- Schloß Eldenburg
- A moated castle above the Elbe marshes, rebuilt as a manor house. The round tower in the drawing is the medieval survival.
- Seventy-five Pfennig
- The value that marks a set rather than a till, and the companion to the fifty.
- Gebr. Parcus, München
- Printed in Munich, six hundred kilometres away - a Brandenburg town buying its emergency money from a Bavarian art press.
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.
The seventy-five carries the same declaration of Slavic origin on the face and, on the reverse, Schloß Eldenburg bei Lenzen mit altem Gutsturm - the Eldenburg with its old manorial tower, the castle that guarded the Elbe crossing here.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 75 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 1921 in the collection.
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