50 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 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.

Lenzen on the Elbe announces its own antiquity on the face: Ort slavischen Ursprungs, der älteste der Prignitz, urkundlich zuerst im Jahre 929 erwähnt - a place of Slavic origin, the oldest in the Prignitz, first recorded in 929.

The reverse is a prize bull. The Lenzener Herdbuchgesellschaft, the local herd-book society founded in 1896, gets a verse of its own: black and white like Prussia's colours, with its ancestors in East Frisia, so farmers, never rest - breed only such herd-book cattle.