25 Pfennig, Stadt Annaburg, 1921 (castle)

Notgeld - "emergency money" - began in 1914 when metal 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. Municipalities commissioned Serienscheine: lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of - a legend, a landmark, a joke in dialect.

Annaburg is a small town in the Elbe lowlands of what was then the Prussian Province of Saxony and is today Saxony-Anhalt. It grew up around an electoral Saxon hunting seat called Lochau; the Renaissance castle on the site was built in the 1570s for the Elector August and his wife Anna of Denmark, and both the Schloss and the town were renamed in her honour - Annaburg, "Anna's castle". From 1762 the building housed a Prussian military orphanage, and the town later became known for its stoneware works.

The 1921 Annaburg Serienschein shares a common front - the fruit-tree arms on a hillock, the words Städtlein Annaburg 1921, red value numerals, the redemption promise that the parish of Annaburg will pay the bearer, and the six-digit serial - while each note carries a different black silhouette scene on the back with a rhyming couplet. This 25-pfennig note shows the red-roofed Schloss Annaburg on its rise among trees, captioned Als Mutter Anna noch in diesem Schlosse war, war weder guter Schnaps noch Gold noch Silber rar - "when Mother Anna still lived in this castle, neither good schnapps nor gold nor silver was scarce," a wry nod to the Electress credited with founding the castle's distillery and apothecary. Its sibling scenes in the collection are the forest note [[notgeld-annaburg-25-pfennig-wald]] and the stoneware note [[notgeld-annaburg-25-pfennig-steingut]].