10 Pfennig, Stadt Paderborn, 1920

By 1920 German Notgeld had stopped being a response to a coin shortage and become a collector's product. Towns, districts and firms commissioned decorative Serienscheine - lithographed sets printed far beyond any local need and sold to collectors, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of: a legend, a famous son, a battle, a trade, a joke in dialect. The result is the most inventive body of graphic design in the history of paper money, made in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Paderborn in Westphalia was a Carolingian royal seat: it was here, at the Pfalz by the springs of the Pader, that Charlemagne received Pope Leo III in 799, the meeting that led to his imperial coronation in Rome the following Christmas. The reverse of this green 10-Pfennig note sets Kaiser Karl der Grosse in a medallion over the springs; the obverse reads Notgeld der Stadt Paderborn / Der Magistrat, dated 1 March 1920.