10 Pfennig, Stadt Halberstadt, 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 by places with a few thousand inhabitants, in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Halberstadt was one of the great half-timbered towns of Germany before 1945, when eighty per cent of it was destroyed in twenty minutes. This April 1921 note shows the Burg von Halberstadt - the cathedral close - with a Low German couplet about a bit of show being worth gilding, and our little coins along with it.