50 Pfennig, Stadt Lütjenburg, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00467
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
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: 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: 90.3 × 57.2 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Holstein Town view

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Stadt Lütjenburg, 1921
Printer: Gebrüder Borchers, Lübeck
Rarity: common

LütjenburgGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Half-timbering: Two coloured houses at a street corner, the sort of thing a small town wanted remembered - and did well to, given what happened to German towns twenty years on.
The Bismarck tower: A stone lookout on the hill above Lütjenburg, one of about two hundred and fifty built across Germany in his memory.
8 March 1921: A week later than the twenty-five and the hundred, so the set was not all printed at once.

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 fifty, dated a week after the others, shows a half-timbered street corner in colour and, on the reverse, the tower on the Bismarckhöhe above the town.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Stadt Lütjenburg, 1921 in the collection.

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