75 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 seventy-five is about the light railway. A train runs along an embankment under the line der Gott der Eisen wachsen ließ, dai gaff uns de Kleinbahn - the God who let iron grow, he gave us the narrow-gauge line - and a second couplet adding that anyone who has once ridden it would rather walk.