50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Ditfurt, 1921 (the tax day)

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 in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Ditfurt is a village on the river Bode a few kilometres east of Quedlinburg, in what was then the Prussian Province of Saxony and is today Saxony-Anhalt. Its 1921 Serienschein is a set of woodcut panels that tell, in rhyming couplets, the local comic tale of the Ditfurt Eierzins - an old render paid to the castle in eggs, and the grudging villagers forever carting their baskets up to the lord's gate. This note is panel 4 of that sequence: tax day itself, the eggs loaded onto an ox-cart until it is heaped full while more are still waiting, under the verse So kam der Steuertag heran. Ein jeder brachte Eier an. Voll war der Wagen bis zum Rand, als manches Schock noch unten stand - "so the tax day came round; each one brought eggs along; the cart was full to the brim while many a Schock still stood below" (a Schock being the old counting unit of sixty). Dated "Ditfurt, 1.7.1921" and signed by Engelbrecht, Gemeindevorstand. The companion scene from this egg-tax set held in the collection is [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-eier]], the peasants at the castle gate.