25 Pfennig, Stadt Magdeburg, 1920
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00473
- Series year
- 1920
- Actually issued
- 1920
- 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
- 69.6 × 50.1 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicSaxony-AnhaltTown hall
The type
- Type
- 25 Pfennig, Stadt Magdeburg, 1920
- Printer
- Not established
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- Das Rathaus
- Rebuilt after the sack of 1631 and again after 1945. The drawing is of the seventeenth-century building.
- Three months' notice
- Validity lapses three months after announcement - longer than most.
- A city of three hundred thousand
- Magdeburg was an industrial capital, and its plain note is working paper rather than a collectors' set. That changed the following year.
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.
Magdeburg's April 1920 voucher is the plain one: a green ground of small stars, a scrolled numeral, and the baroque Rathaus on the reverse.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 25 Pfennig, Stadt Magdeburg, 1920 in the collection.
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