50 Pfennig, Stadt Annaburg, 1921 (tavern)

Notgeld - "emergency money" - began in 1914 when metal coin vanished into hoards and towns printed their own small change. By 1920 it had become a collector's craze: municipalities commissioned Serienscheine, lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with local legends, landmarks and jokes in dialect and sold to collectors for real marks the town hoped never to repay.

Annaburg is a small town in the Elbe lowlands of what was then the Prussian Province of Saxony, today Saxony-Anhalt. It grew up around an electoral Saxon hunting seat, Lochau, whose Renaissance castle was rebuilt in the 1570s for the Elector August and his wife Anna of Denmark; the town took her name. The 1921 series turns small-town life into a run of gently comic silhouettes.

All six notes share a front - the fruit-tree arms, Städtlein Annaburg 1921, red value numerals, the parish redemption promise and a six-digit serial - and differ only in the black scene and verse on the back. This 50-pfennig note shows the interior of a tavern in silhouette: a lit window and figures at their drink. The verse jokes about the husband who finds his way too often to the inn and lingers there "breathing in the good smells," a domestic grumble of a kind the whole series trades in. Its companions among the 50-pfennig notes in the collection are the "cares and liqueur" note [[notgeld-annaburg-50-pfennig-sorgen]] and the lantern note [[notgeld-annaburg-50-pfennig-laterne]], alongside the three 25-pfennig scenes [[notgeld-annaburg-25-pfennig-schloss]], [[notgeld-annaburg-25-pfennig-wald]] and [[notgeld-annaburg-25-pfennig-steingut]].