50 Pfennig, Stadt Colditz, 1921 (the Hussites)

Notgeld - "emergency money" - began in 1914 when metal coin vanished into hoards and German towns printed their own small change. By 1920 it had become a collector's craze: municipalities commissioned Serienscheine, lithographed sets printed far beyond local need and illustrated with the town's legends, sieges and disasters, taking real marks for paper they hoped would never be redeemed.

Colditz is a Saxon town on the river Mulde between Leipzig and Chemnitz, grown up around 1200 beneath a castle first recorded in 1046. In 1404 the Lords of Colditz sold town and castle to the Margraves of Meissen; a generation later the town met one of the Hussite raiding columns that swept out of Bohemia into Saxony during the Hussite Wars. In 1430 the Hussites took Colditz and set both town and castle on fire - a catastrophe the town still remembered half a millennium later.

The notes of the 1921 series share a cream-and-red front - Gutschein über 50 Pf, the Colditz castle-gate arms with their lion, Stadt Colditz Sachsen and the validity line Gültig bis auf Widerruf - and differ in the scene on the back. This note shows the Hussite assault as a yellow-and-black silhouette battle, over the verse Vom Jahr 1430 wird berichtet, daß Colditz von den Husiten ... vernichtet ... O tempora, o mores! - "of the year 1430 it is reported that Colditz was destroyed by the Hussites ... O the times, O the manners!" It is the companion to the Thirty Years' War note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-schweden]], and shares the series with the stoneware note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-steingut]], the town-hall note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-rathaus]], the tower note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-heimatturm]] and the Mulde-valley note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-muldental]].