50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Ditfurt, 1921 (origin of the egg tax)

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 joke in dialect. The town took real marks for paper it hoped would never be presented.

Ditfurt is a village on the river Bode a few kilometres east of Quedlinburg, in what was then the Prussian Province of Saxony and is today Saxony-Anhalt. In 974 it was among the royal estates made over to the imperial abbess of Quedlinburg, and from that medieval lordship grew the local comic tale the village chose for its 1921 series: the Ditfurt Eierzins, a render once owed to the abbey and paid in eggs. The set is a run of black-and-orange woodcut panels (signed by an artist "M.F.") that tell the story in rhyming couplets, the villagers forever grumbling as they cart their eggs up to the castle.

This note is panel 1, the origin of the tax. The back shows peasants driving their oxen, under the verse Es war in jener alten Zeit, als die Äbtissin Adelheid von Ditfurt Steuern noch bekam, die sie in Form von Eiern nahm - "it was in that old time, when the Abbess Adelheid still received taxes from Ditfurt, which she took in the form of eggs." The Adelheid named is an abbess of Quedlinburg, under whose rule the note places the beginning of the egg-render. The face is the shared Gutschein der Gemeinde Ditfurt / 50 Pfennig with its rooster and hen vignettes. The other panels of this egg-tax set held in the collection are [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-eier]] (the peasants at the castle gate) and [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-steuertag]] (loading the cart on tax-day); see also the companion panel [[notgeld-ditfurt-50-pfennig-bauersfrau]].