25 Pfennig, Gemeinde Badbergen, 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 in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Badbergen sits in the Artland, the fertile farming district north-east of Osnabrück in what was then the Prussian Province of Hanover (hence i/Hann. on the face) and is today Lower Saxony. The Artland - the Protestant parishes of Badbergen, Gehrde and Menslage with the town of Quakenbrück - grew wealthy on good soil, and that wealth left two things the region is still known for: hundreds of monumental half-timbered farmhouses, and a prosperous landed farmer class with a dress of its own. The twenty-five celebrates both halves of that identity. The front shows the parish church of St. Georg, the oldest building in the village; the back, titled Alte Artländer Trachten ("old Artland costumes"), shows three men in the traditional festival dress of the Artland farmers - the sober, well-cut black-and-silver Sunday Tracht of a region that could afford to dress its men like that. The note is dated "Badbergen 1921" and signed by Junghans, the Gemeindevorsteher (parish head).