1 Mark, Gemeinde Frose, 1921 (Mönch und Nonne, Preisrätsel Teil 1)

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.

Frose is a small village in Anhalt, on the edge of a shallow lake between Aschersleben and Gernrode, and its set is one of the rare Preisrätsel (prize-puzzle) issues, drawn by W. Dockhorn and printed by Louis Koch in Halberstadt, dated "Frose, den 27. Juni 1921."

This is the 1 Mark note, and it is a Doppelschein: a double note whose two halves could be cut apart, each half worth 50 Pfennig on its own. It is marked "Preisrätsel Teil 1," the first part of the puzzle series. The left half remembers the two religious houses that gave Frose its early importance - a monks' cloister and, a little later, a convent of nuns - under two Romanesque arches captioned "Mönchskloster 950" and "Nonnenstift 961," with a monk under one and a nun under the other. Between them runs a mocking rhyme on the dangers of putting the two under one roof: "Sind Mönch u. Nonne an einem Ort, gibt's bösen Zungen manch Lästerwort / Drum trennt Euch lieber..." - so better part, better be cut in two, which is also the joke of a note made to be divided. The right half carries a Bilderrätsel. The medieval foundation of Frose is bound up with the collegiate church of St. Cyriakus and the nearby abbey of Gernrode, into which the Froser house was drawn as a dependency. See the companion puzzles in the set, the [[notgeld-frose-50-pfennig-roesselsprung]] and the [[notgeld-frose-50-pfennig-bilderraetsel]].