75 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 1921 (Turnvater Jahn)

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 by places with a few thousand inhabitants, in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Lenzen on the Elbe had a famous son close at hand. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852), the Turnvater - the "father of gymnastics" - was born in the village of Lanz, a few kilometres from the town, where his father was the pastor. From 1811 he built the first open-air Turnplatz in Berlin and founded the German gymnastics movement, a mixture of physical training and nationalist feeling that spread into the Turnvereine found in almost every German town by 1921. The reverse of this note is his portrait, claimed by the district he came from.

The face carries the town's standing boast of its own antiquity, the same declaration found on the other Lenzen notes; see the companion [[notgeld-lenzen-75-pfennig]] with the Eldenburg and the [[notgeld-lenzen-50-pfennig]] with the Herdbuch bull.