1/2 Mark

Ströbeck is a village in the Harz region with a documented chess-playing tradition stretching back to at least the eleventh century — a curiosity that made it a natural candidate for novelty notgeld during the inflation years. The municipality leaned into that identity, and Himmer in Augsburg, one of the more prolific small-format notgeld printers of the period, produced the run.

Himmer handled enormous volumes of municipal notgeld commissions between 1920 and 1922, which kept unit costs low for tiny issuers like Ströbeck who would otherwise have had no printing infrastructure whatsoever.