5 Pfennig, Stadt Waltershausen, 1921

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 in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Waltershausen sits at the north-west foot of the Thuringian Forest and had long been the German doll-making town: Johann Daniel Kestner established papier-mâché doll manufacture here in the early nineteenth century, and the firm of Kämmer & Reinhardt, founded in 1885, made it the acknowledged centre of the trade. This small 5-Pfennig note sets the town's two old towers against the value. The obverse shows the Claustor, a surviving medieval gate-tower; the reverse the Töpfersturm ("Potter's Tower"), and carries the serial, the date, the issuing line Der Stadtrat and the redemption promise. Dated Waltershausen, den 1. Juli 1921. See also the town's larger note, [[notgeld-waltershausen-10-pfennig]], which puts the local industries on display.