50 Pfennig, Stadt Colditz, 1921 (the Swedes)

Notgeld - "emergency money" - began in 1914 when metal coin vanished into hoards and German towns printed their own small change. By 1920 it had become a collector's craze: municipalities commissioned Serienscheine, lithographed sets printed far beyond local need and illustrated with the town's legends, sieges and landmarks, taking real marks for paper they hoped would never be redeemed.

Colditz is a Saxon town on the river Mulde between Leipzig and Chemnitz, grown up around 1200 beneath a castle first recorded in 1046. Its Renaissance Schloss - later notorious as the Second World War prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C - crowns a rocky spur above the town. Colditz had a hard history of fire and war: the Hussites burned it in 1430, a great fire destroyed much of it in 1504, and the Thirty Years' War brought the armies through again. Its 1921 series makes those disasters the subject of its pictures.

All the notes share a cream-and-red front - Gutschein über 50 Pf, the Colditz castle-gate arms with their lion, Stadt Colditz Sachsen, and the validity line Gültig bis auf Widerruf - and differ in the scene on the back. This note recalls the Thirty Years' War: Swedish troops firing the town, over the verse Als 1637 die Schweden zogen durchs Land, da wurde Colditz gänzlich von ihnen niedergebrannt. Vae victis! - "when in 1637 the Swedes marched through the land, Colditz was burned wholly to the ground by them. Woe to the vanquished!" The 1637 date is given on the note and reflects the town's own memory of the war. Its siblings in the collection are the Hussite note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-husiten]], the stoneware note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-steingut]], the town-hall note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-rathaus]], the tower note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-heimatturm]] and the Mulde-valley note [[notgeld-colditz-50-pfennig-muldental]].