25 Pfennig, Notgeld of Hammelburg, 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.

The twenty-five is the interesting one. Its reverse is given over to a portrait of Johann Froben, who was born in Hammelburg in the 1460s and became the greatest printer in Basel - Erasmus's publisher and friend, the man who put the first printed Greek New Testament into Europe's hands in 1516 and whose house Holbein worked in. The note names him, dates his death to 1527, and sets his printer's device beside him.

A town of a few thousand people, printing emergency money in the last year of a lost war, chose to spend the design on a printer who had left five hundred years earlier. The face is the town itself: roofs and towers along the Saale, vineyards climbing the hill behind, with the denomination and the serial number in a panel below.