75 Pfennig, Stadt Lenzen an der Elbe, 1921 (Stumpfer Turm)

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.

The reverse of this value is the Stumpfer Turm, the "blunt tower" - the stump of the medieval town fortifications and the one piece of them that still stands. It was the tower of the old Bergtor, one of the three gates in a fieldstone-and-brick wall that once ringed the town; its lower stage is octagonal and its upper stage round, and it lost the conical roof that would once have made it look less abrupt. The town claims an unbroken history back to 929, the year of its first mention and of the battle fought here; the other notes of the set carry the Eldenburg - see the companion [[notgeld-lenzen-75-pfennig]] - and the Herdbuch bull of [[notgeld-lenzen-50-pfennig]].