Old Money Registry

Types / 1921

50 Pfennig, Spar- und Darlehnskasse Oberheldrungen, 1921 (the Kreuzstein)

Jubiläums-Gutschein, Ländliche Spar- u. Darlehnskasse Oberheldrungen u. Umgegend

common Grabowski/Mehl 995.1

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 shows the Oberheldrunger Kreuzstein — an old carved stone cross with a worn inscription, standing among the fields above the village — flanked by a banner-bearer and a stag in the side panels, with dialect verses. Medieval stone crosses of this kind, scattered across the German countryside, usually marked a death or an act of atonement; their original stories are mostly lost, and the note offers it as one of the village's venerable landmarks.

1 copy in the collection