25 Pfennig, Stadt Zörbig, 1921 (Reinhold Schmidt)

By 1920 German Notgeld had become a collector's product. Towns commissioned decorative Serienscheine - lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of. Zörbig, a small town in Anhalt (today Saxony-Anhalt) and an early centre of German tobacco-growing, built its 1921 series around its notable sons. Each note shares a face of a winged genius holding the town's blue-and-gold striped shield, Notgeld der Stadt Zörbig / 25 Pfennig, and carries on the back a portrait and short biography of a local worthy, a Roman series numeral and the Zörbig skyline, under the motto So helfen wir uns mit Papier - "thus we help ourselves with paper." The notes were designed by H. Schiebel and printed at Bitterfeld in 1921.

This note honours the writer Reinhold Schmidt (died 1 October 1906), the town's own chronicler, who wrote a history and description of Zörbig. Where Reiske and Fleischer carried the town's name out into the wider world of scholarship, Schmidt turned his attention inward, to Zörbig itself - exactly the kind of local historian whose work a town would want to honour on a note built around civic pride.

Little about Schmidt is independently documented beyond the note and local record, so the note should be read as commemorating a respected local author rather than a nationally known figure; his service to the town was precisely in setting down its own past. It is fitting that his portrait should sit in a series that is itself a small act of local history-making.