25 Pfennig, Gemeinde Ditfurt, 1921

Notgeld - "emergency money" - began in 1914 when metal coin vanished into hoards within weeks of mobilisation and the Reichsbank could not supply enough small change. Towns, districts and firms printed their own. By 1920 the shortage was easing but the craze was not: municipalities commissioned decorative Gutscheine, lithographed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, who paid real marks for paper the town hoped would never be redeemed.

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. In 974 the village was among the royal estates made over to the imperial abbess of Quedlinburg; its medieval dues to that abbey are the subject of the separate egg-tax woodcut series (see [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-eier]] and [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-steuertag]]). This note belongs to the plainer Gutschein von Ditfurt family, with a Low-German motto on the face and a colour village view on the back.

The face carries the dialect rhyme Käuhlen Kopp und warme Fäut, Hinnerpförtchen open, lat den Dokter lopen - "a cool head and warm feet, the back door open, and you can let the doctor run" - a piece of folk health-wisdom. The back shows a panorama of Ditfurt on the Bode (An der Bode). The note is dated at Ditfurt, 1 July 1921, and signed by Engelbrecht, Gemeindevorstand.