25 Pfennig, Stadt Soemmerda, 1921 (Dreyse)

By 1920 German Notgeld had stopped being a response to a coin shortage and become a collector's product. Towns, districts and firms commissioned decorative Serienscheine - lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of: a legend, a famous son, a battle, a trade, a joke in dialect. The result is the most inventive body of graphic design in the history of paper money, made in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Soemmerda in Thuringia calls itself here Dreyse's Geburtsstadt - the birthplace of Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse (1787-1867), the gunsmith who invented the needle gun (Zuendnadelgewehr), the breech-loading rifle adopted by Prussia in 1841 whose rate of fire helped decide the war of 1866 against Austria. Dreyse's workshop grew into the arms factory that became part of Rheinmetall. The note shows a figure demonstrating the rifle, over Notgeld der Stadt Soemmerda / Der Magistrat, 1921.