50 Pfennig, Stadt Bayreuth, 1918

This is Kriegsnotgeld - war emergency money, not the collectors' Notgeld of 1920-21 that followed it. Within weeks of mobilisation in 1914 silver and nickel coin vanished from circulation into hoards, and the Reichsbank could not supply enough small notes to replace it. Towns, districts and firms filled the gap themselves, on their own authority, redeemable against their own treasuries.

These early issues look like what they are: functional paper, serially numbered, with a validity tied not to a date but to the end of a war nobody could date.

Bayreuth's fifty-Pfennig voucher is dated 22 October 1918 - three weeks before the armistice, in the last days of the monarchy that had paid for the town's fame. It is serially numbered, signed by the town magistrate and the municipal treasurer, and valid only within the town district.

The face is conventional: rose-pink guilloche, blackletter display, a formula. The reverse is not. It shows the Festspielhaus - the theatre Wagner built on the hill above the town in 1876 to stage the Ring, the only opera house in the world designed for one composer's work. Bayreuth put the building its whole modern identity rests on onto a fifty-pfennig note, in the month the state that subsidised it fell.