75 Pfennig, Gemeinde Tiefurt, 1921 (Wieland)

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. 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.

Tiefurt, a village on the Ilm just outside Weimar, became in 1781 the summer retreat of the widowed Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar, who made its grounds a celebrated Musenhof. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) was the senior writer of that circle: called to Weimar in 1772 as tutor to the young princes, he was the first of the great authors to settle there, and a regular guest in Anna Amalia's park. In the 1780s the park was the setting for the open-air theatricals and literary games of the court, and the note captions its portrait "Wieland in Tiefurt 1782."

This highest value of the set shows Wieland's bust in a laurel oval; its front, shared with the rest of the set, carries the words "Gemeinde Tiefurt / Notgeld", a profile medallion and the Goethean legend "Der Zettel hier ist 75 Pf wert." The notes were printed by the Wiedemann press in Saalfeld. See the companion notes, the [[notgeld-tiefurt-25-pfennig-park]], the [[notgeld-tiefurt-50-pfennig-denkmal]] and the [[notgeld-tiefurt-50-pfennig-park]].