50 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921

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 Lippspringe is a spa at the source of the Lippe, and its 1921 set was drawn by Josef Dominicus of Paderborn in heavy black-line woodcut. The town's claim is antiquity: the springs appear in Roman writers, a camp of the elder Nero stood nearby, and Charlemagne summoned the Saxons here three times.

The fifty is the quietest of the three: a kneeling figure drinking from the spring on the face, and on the reverse nothing but the denomination among black firs.