1 Mark, Gemeinde Lunderup (Rothenkrug), 1920

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 the notes had also become carriers of politics, and nowhere more sharply than in Schleswig. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles put the Danish-German border to a vote: plebiscites in Northern and Central Schleswig, the northern zone polling on 10 February 1920. On both sides the emergency money turned into propaganda, printed to argue a national case in pictures and to be kept rather than spent.

This 1 Mark note is from the Gemeinde Lunderup - Rothenkrug in German, Rødekro in Danish - a place in North Schleswig that the vote assigned to Denmark. It is a bilingual, two-nation note. The obverse is the German case: a Reichsadler, the imperial eagle, over the black-white-red of the old empire, set beside a blue-white-red flag. The reverse is the Danish case, lettered in Danish: a view of Rødekro with its windmill and half-timbered houses under the Dannebrog, the Danish flag. The design is by C. G. Sick, printed by Gebr. Kunze in Flensburg, dated 1.4.1920 and signed by Bartelsen as Gemeindevorsteher (village head). It is a small monument to a border being redrawn - a German municipal note already looking across to the country its town was about to join.