50 Pfennig, Institut für Seefischerei Geestemünde, 1921 (Altona arms)

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 an issuer could take real marks for paper it hoped would never be presented. So towns, firms and institutions commissioned Serienscheine: lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and illustrated with whatever the place was proud of - a legend, a famous son, a trade, 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.

Geestemünde, on the east bank of the Geeste where it meets the Weser estuary, grew in the late nineteenth century into one of Germany's great deep-sea fishing ports; the steam trawler fleet worked out of its fish harbour, and by 1913 scores of Fischdampfer were based there. (Geestemünde was joined to neighbouring Lehe and Wesermünde and is today part of Bremerhaven.) It was here that the Institut für Seefischerei (Sea-Fisheries Institute) was founded at the initiative of the local fishing industry to do applied research on fish processing and preservation and to train the fleet's captains and mates. The institute issued a city-arms set, its captions in Low German, to be redeemed until 24 November 1921.

Each note of the set pairs the arms of a North Sea or Hanseatic city - the ports whose markets and fleets the Geestemünde industry was bound up with - with a fishing scene. This note carries the arms of Altona, then a city in its own right on the lower Elbe just west of Hamburg (it was absorbed into Hamburg in 1937) and the seat of one of Germany's busiest fish markets. The companion notes of the set carry the arms of Rostock, Kiel, Cuxhaven, Lübeck and Emden; see also the related pair [[notgeld-geestemuende-50-pfennig-fischersmann]] and [[notgeld-geestemuende-50-pfennig-frische-fische]].