25 Pfennig, Fallersleben, 1920

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.

Fallersleben, a small town on the Lüneburg Heath (now part of Wolfsburg in Lower Saxony), was the birthplace of the poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874), who took the town's name as his own. In 1841, on the then-British island of Helgoland, he wrote Das Lied der Deutschen, later the German national anthem. The town's Notgeld set is a monument to him: each note quotes a verse of the Lied on the obverse and shows a Fallersleben site with the poet's portrait on the reverse. This 25-Pfennig value carries the second verse, "Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue, deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang...", and its reverse is captioned Schloß, Amtsgericht, Kirche ("castle, district court, church") beside the poet's portrait. The set is a Gutschein von Fallersleben, printed by Druckerei Appelhans in Braunschweig, dated Fallersleben, 1. Oktober 1920 and signed by the mayor Fr. Sohling, Bürgermeister; it carries no serial number. The collection also holds the 10-Pfennig [[notgeld-fallersleben-10-pfennig]] and the 50-Pfennig [[notgeld-fallersleben-50-pfennig]].