25 Pfennig, Stadt Itzehoe, 1920

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.

Itzehoe on the Stör is one of the oldest towns in Holstein, and its August 1920 note is entirely in Low German. Twintig Penn un teif darto, de lüttste Schien von Itzehoe - twenty pence and a bit besides, the littlest note of Itzehoe - over a market scene of Holstein country people in eighteenth-century dress.