50 Pfennig, Stadt Glauchau, 1921 (Dütterwitsch silhouette, "'n Faß Milch bis auf den Grund")

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 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.

Glauchau, a textile town in Saxony, was home to the Ratsdruckerei R. Dulce, which printed decorative Notgeld for towns across Germany. For its own 50-Pfennig notes Dulce issued a set of black cut-paper silhouettes (Scherenschnitte) that tell, scene by scene and in rhymed couplets, the comic local legend of the "Dütterwitsch" - the Saxon-dialect word for buttermilk (soured milk) and, by extension, the nickname of one of the town's towers. The Glauchau tale is a local version of the widely-told German Buttermilchturm ("buttermilk tower") legend recorded by the Brothers Grimm: a lord or burgomaster demands buttermilk from the peasants, who mock his messenger and refuse; he gets the better of them, a barrel of soured milk has to be drunk to the dregs, and ever after the tower is nicknamed the Dütterwitschturm. In the Glauchau retelling the burgomaster even stuffs brooms into the tower. The legend is attested here chiefly by the notes themselves and their captions.

Every note in the set shares one obverse: a green and dark-red city gate between two brick towers, a central turret topped by a windmill, a crescent moon-face, two owls, the Glauchau arms (a shield of red-and-white diagonal bars), the value "50" set in red cog-wheels, and the serial number. Each reverse carries one unique black silhouette scene captioned with a rhymed couplet. This is the 50-Pfennig companion to the town's 75-Pfennig "beer-war" (Bierkrieg) silhouette set - see [[notgeld-glauchau-75-pfennig-bierkrieg-2]].

The reckoning comes due on this sheet: the couplet has the culprits empty, with sour faces, a whole barrel of milk down to the dregs, and the silhouette shows the milk-carriers with their yokes and buckets beside a little house.