5 Pfennig, Carl Ouden, Lassan-Zinnowitz

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.

Not a town at all: a draper. Carl Ouden sold Manufaktur- und Modewaren - fabrics and fashion goods - in Lassan on the Peene and in the seaside resort of Zinnowitz on Usedom, and issued his own numbered vouchers in five-pfennig and one-pfennig denominations.

Shop scrip of this kind is the most ordinary and least collected end of Notgeld. A shopkeeper could not make change either, and a voucher good only in his own two shops cost him nothing to print and kept the customer coming back.