20 Mark, Reichsbanknote, 1914

This note is dated Berlin, 19 February 1914, in the last months of peace, and it belongs to the mature Reichsbanknote design that the Reichsbank had been issuing since 1908. When war came that August, gold and silver coin vanished almost overnight and paper of exactly this kind became the everyday money of the Empire. The Reichsbank simply kept the plates running, so a note conceived before the war ended up financing it.

The engraving is deliberately imperial. An ornate blue-green frame surrounds panels of guilloche and allegory, the text names the Reichsbankdirektorium — the governing board of the central bank — and the imperial eagle presides over the design. Notes of this era carried the printed signatures of the directorate members rather than hand-signing, and the obligation on the face promised payment by the Reichsbank's main cashier in Berlin.

The twenty-mark denomination sat just above the small change of the day and circulated hard. Printed by the Reichsdruckerei in Berlin on watermarked paper, it has no modern security thread; its defences were the watermark, the fine guilloche, and the sheer familiarity of the design. By 1923 twenty marks would not buy a postage stamp, and vast numbers of these notes were set aside, which is why they remain so plentiful today.