Types / 1921
50 Pfennig, Spar- und Darlehnskasse Oberheldrungen, 1921 (Adolf Gräser)
Jubiläums-Gutschein, Ländliche Spar- u. Darlehnskasse Oberheldrungen u. Umgegend
What was happening
Oberheldrungen is a village by the Kyffhäuser in what is now northern Thuringia; in 1921 it lay in the Prussian Province of Saxony. Its rural savings-and-loan cooperative — the Ländliche Spar- und Darlehnskasse Oberheldrungen und Umgegend, a Raiffeisen-type credit union founded on 20 March 1896 — marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1921 with a set of six 50-Pfennig Jubiläums-Gutscheine, emergency notes that doubled as a keepsake of the jubilee.
Every note shares the same ornate Jugendstil front: the cooperative's monogram, three oval signature stamps (the middle one reading Gültig bis 1.12.1921), the anniversary dates 20.3.1896–20.3.1921, and the printer's line "Druck: Adolf Forker, Leipzig". The value, 50 Pfennig, is carried in the border rather than as a large central numeral. The six reverses each show a local scene or figure with a verse in the Thuringian dialect.
This note's reverse is a portrait, in a laurel wreath and dated 1839–1879, of Adolf Gräser of Oberheldrungen — a locally celebrated figure whom the dialect verse calls widely known throughout Germany. He was most likely the village's long-serving pastor, and very probably the antiquarian whose collection of prehistoric finds appears on another note in this set; the exact grounds of his national fame are not firmly documented.