50 Pfennig, Stadt Medebach, 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.

Medebach is a small town in the Sauerland uplands of Westphalia, and its September 1921 notes are in Sauerland Low German throughout - a dialect different again from the Plattdeutsch of the coast.

The fifty is a farming note. A man rakes hay at sunrise inside a wreath of thistles, under a Low German couplet: bo ten Mistus, dao ten Christus - where there is muck, there is Christ.