50 Pfennig, Stadt Liegnitz, 1920

This copy

Accession: OM-00459
Serial: Serie IV 201874
Series year: 1920
Actually issued: 1920
magistrate_1: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
magistrate_2: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
Grade: AU (IBNS)
Bright; light corner wear. About uncurrent: bright and unfolded, with light handling - a corner bump or a faint edge tone. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which cannot show paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $8 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 79.5 × 51.4 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Silesia Town view

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Stadt Liegnitz, 1920
Printer: Geographisches Institut Paul Baron, Liegnitz
Rarity: common

LiegnitzGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Serie IV: A fourth print run - Liegnitz had been issuing since 1917 and kept going.
Das alte Rathaus: The baroque town hall on the ring. Liegnitz was heavily destroyed in 1945; the town is Legnica in Poland and its German population is gone.
Geographisches Institut Paul Baron: A local map-printing house, which is why the note looks more like a cartographic job than an art print.

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.

Liegnitz was one of the chief towns of Lower Silesia, seat of a line of Piast dukes until 1675 and the site of the battle of 1241 where a Mongol army destroyed a European one. This is its fourth series of vouchers, plainly printed, showing the altes Rathaus.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Stadt Liegnitz, 1920 in the collection.

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