25 Pfennig, Kreis Diepholz, 1920

By 1920 German Notgeld had stopped being a response to a coin shortage and become a collector's product. Towns, districts and firms commissioned decorative Serienscheine - lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of: a legend, a famous son, a battle, a trade, 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.

The rural district (Kreis) of Diepholz in the moorland of Lower Saxony issued a set of single-colour notes in September 1920, redeemable at the district savings bank three months after a call published in the Diepholzer Kreiszeitung. This 25-Pfennig value is printed in blue, with an interlace border and a Low-German hall-house - the long thatched farmstead of the north German plain. It is the small sister of the 50-Pfennig note of the same series held in this collection.