50 Pfennig, Stadt Höxter, 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.

Höxter stands on the Weser beside the abbey of Corvey, and its note is about the man buried there. Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote the Lied der Deutschen on Heligoland in 1841; dismissed from his chair at Breslau for his politics, he ended as librarian to the Duke of Ratibor at Corvey from 1860 and died there in 1874. The note records exactly that, in capitals across the reverse.