75 Pfennig, Stadt Hessisch Oldendorf, 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.

Hessisch Oldendorf on the Weser tells a banishing story: the townspeople drove the devil into the Totental, the valley of the dead, and into a well with a sieve over it, to be released only when a hard winter turns all the water to ice - whereupon he strikes his hour of freedom, returns as a spectre to his old lodging, and the whole thing begins again.