50 Pfennig, Gemeinde Steinfeld in Angeln, 1920 (Goldacker)

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 in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

This is Steinfeld on the Angeln peninsula of Schleswig - the Amt Süderbrarup, Kreis Schleswig-Flensburg - and not the larger Steinfeld in Oldenburg. Angeln lies just below the Danish border drawn by the 1920 Schleswig plebiscites, and this is one of the earliest notes of the little parish, dated 30 June 1920 and good for a year to 30 June 1921. The front shows a farmstead captioned Goldacker ("gold field") hung with the German tricolour and the line Notgeld aus Steinfeld; the back returns to Goldacker, which is also the name of a genuine local antiquity - the prehistoric urn field and presumed Thingstätte (assembly site) whose black stones and urn the modern parish arms still carry. Three apple trees stand over a Low-German verse that shrugs at the whole enterprise: In Steenfeld in Angeln deit an Gheld oft mangeln, dat hier is Ersatz un füllt ok sien Platz - "In Steinfeld in Angeln money is often short; this here is a substitute and fills its place well enough."

Note for cataloguers: this collection also holds an "eagle" Steinfeld series currently filed under locality 'Steinfeld' (Oldenburg) - see [[notgeld-steinfeld-75-pfennig-eagle]] and [[notgeld-steinfeld-1-mark-eagle]] - whose motto Wir wollen keine Dänen sein / Wir wollen Deutsche bleiben belongs to the Schleswig plebiscite, odd matter for an Oldenburg village. That raises an open question, not a conclusion: the eagle series may in fact also be this Steinfeld in Angeln rather than the Oldenburg one. Left flagged for review, not asserted.