50 Pfennig, Stadt Arnstadt, the siege of 1342

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.

Arnstadt's set is by A. Paul Weber, born in the town in 1893 and later the most unsettling German satirical draughtsman of his century - the lithographer of Das Verhängnis, arrested by the Gestapo in 1937, still working into the 1970s. In 1921 he was twenty-eight, and this is his own town's money.

It is not decorative. Each ten-Pfennig note shows two grotesques doing business - a beaked, hunched creature and a sack-laden burgher - and a verse runs right round the border, continuing from note to note across the set, on hoarding and usury and what used to be done about it:

Diese Brut kennst du, mein Lieber: es sind Wucherer und Schieber. Früher wurden sie an den Galgen gehoben, heute wird ruhig weitergeschoben.

You know this brood, my dear: they are usurers and profiteers. They used to be strung up on the gallows; today the shoving carries quietly on. A town put that on its own currency, in the year the currency started to die.

The fifty leaves the satire alone. It is printed in blue rather than red, and its reverse is a three-panel history painting: two armoured men flanking a scene of the town under attack, captioned 1342 - erfolglose Belagerung Arnstadts durch die Erfurter, the unsuccessful siege of Arnstadt by the men of Erfurt.