60 Pfennig, Stadt Altona, 1921

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.

Altona was a separate city until 1938, Danish until 1864, Prussian afterwards, and always Hamburg's neighbour and rival on the Elbe. Its December 1921 notes are about the river: a steamer at anchor on the sixty, the old fishing quarter on the eighty.