50 Pfennig, Stadt Medebach, 1921

This copy

Accession: OM-00480
Series year: 1921
Actually issued: 1921
council_1: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
council_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: 91.6 × 60.9 mm (±1.1, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Westphalia Sauerland Low German Agriculture

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Stadt Medebach, 1921
Printer: F. W. Becker, Arnsberg
Rarity: common

MedebachGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Bo ten Mistus, dao ten Christus: A farmer's proverb, and a blunt one: the dung heap is where the blessing is. Sauerland dialect, printed on municipal currency.
Kloster Glindfeld: The face shows the former Premonstratensian house at Glindfeld outside the town, with two figures resting in front of it.
F. W. Becker, Arnsberg: The Sauerland printer, in the district capital thirty kilometres north.

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.

Medebach is a small town in the Sauerland uplands of Westphalia, and its September 1921 notes are in Sauerland Low German throughout - a dialect different again from the Plattdeutsch of the coast.

The fifty is a farming note. A man rakes hay at sunrise inside a wreath of thistles, under a Low German couplet: bo ten Mistus, dao ten Christus - where there is muck, there is Christ.

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

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