75 Pfennig, Provincial Union of Westphalia, 1920

Gutschein des Provinzialverbandes Westfalen

common

What was happening

This one is not a joke and not a souvenir. It was issued in May 1920 by the Provincial Union of Westphalia for the benefit of the war-disabled and the dependants of the fallen - für Kriegsbeschädigte und Kriegerhinterbliebene - and redeemed by the settlement fund office of the Provinzialverband against surrender of the note.

Across the foot of the face runs the purpose: Schafft Kriegerheimstätten! - build homesteads for the soldiers. The vignette shows a settlement cottage with a garden, a wounded man standing in front of it, and inset beside him a woman and two children walking away down a lane. The reverse is a battlefield, ranks of men in the open ground with a single soldier watching from the right, framed in red roses.

Germany came out of the war with something over two and a half million disabled men and far more widows and orphans. The settlement movement - giving a maimed soldier a house and a patch of land he could work - was one of the few answers anyone had, and this note was part of paying for it.

Symbology

The settlement cottage: A small house with a garden and a fruit tree - the *Kriegerheimstätte*, the thing the note was sold to pay for. A disabled man and a patch of land he could still work was the period's answer to a problem it had no other answer to.
The wounded man and the family: He stands in front of the house; inset beside him a woman and two children walk away down a lane. The two groups the fund existed for, drawn in one frame.
The battlefield: The reverse shows ranks of men advancing across open ground under a dark sky, with a single figure watching. Set against the cottage on the other face, the note makes its argument in two pictures and needs no text to do it.
Roses: The battlefield is framed in a border of red roses - mourning, and the only softness anywhere on the note.
A province, not a town: The Provinzialverband was the self-governing body of the Prussian province of Westphalia, with welfare among its responsibilities. This is emergency money doing social policy.

Rarity

German municipal Notgeld survives in very large quantities - much of it went straight from the printer into an album and has never been folded. Catalogued by town in Grabowski and Mehl; the reference number for this note is not yet confirmed against it.

75 Pfennig, Provincial Union of Westphalia, 1920

What was happening

2 copies in the collection