25 Pfennig, Gemeinde Stotel, 1921 (the castle)

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 verse. 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.

Stotel is a marsh village on the Lune, a little south of Geestemünde in what was then the Prussian Province of Hanover and is today part of Loxstedt in Lower Saxony. In the Middle Ages it was the seat of the counts of Stotel, who held a moated castle (the Burg Stotel) here; the dates that appear on the notes of this set - 1234, 1245 - belong to that comital past. The parish commissioned a 25-Pfennig set, dated 1921, whose shared face honours the Frisian poet Hermann Allmers (1821-1902) of nearby Rechtenfleth on the Weser. Allmers, the "Marschendichter," made the Weser marshes the subject of his writing, above all in his Marschenbuch of 1858; 1921 was the centenary of his birth, which the note marks. The face carries his portrait and a verse of a Frisian song associated with him (the set is usually described as an Allmers / Friesenlied series); the exact text and the attribution of the verse are read from the note and not independently confirmed here.

Each note of the set carries a different local or legendary scene on the back. This note shows a red tower or fortress on a rock, dated 1234 - a recollection of the medieval Burg Stotel and the counts who held it - beneath a verse about the lords of the towns. See the companion notes [[notgeld-stotel-25-pfennig-marschbauernhof]], [[notgeld-stotel-25-pfennig-wappen]] and [[notgeld-stotel-25-pfennig-ritter]].