Types / 1922
50 Pfennig, Mecklenburg-Schwerin State Ministry, 1922
What was happening
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 by places with a few thousand inhabitants, in the years when Germany's currency was dying.
The companion to the state ministry's twenty-five: same guarantee, same printer, same four ministers' signatures, valid to 1 May 1922. The face is a panorama of the Free State - Schwerin's towers on one side, a windmill and the Baltic on the other - with the bull's head of Mecklenburg between them.
