50 Pfennig, Stadt Weissenfels, 1921 (shoe industry)

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.

Weissenfels on the Saale was Germany's Schuhstadt - the shoe city - and its Notgeld advertises the trade. The scene contrasts a soldier's boot of 1914 with a lady's shoe of 1919: the factory turning from army boots back to civilian footwear after the war, its benches of cobblers replaced by machines - Eiserner Gesellen Kraft ("the strength of iron journeymen") now turning out shoes a hundredfold. The obverse carries the town arms and Notgeld der Stadt Weissenfels / Der Magistrat, issued 1921.