1/2 Mark - Coblenz Görres

Issued by the city of Koblenz in 1921 as emergency coinage — Notgeld — during the postwar currency chaos that left municipal authorities scrambling to fill the void left by an absent functioning national coinage. Johann Joseph von Görres, the Rhenish Catholic publicist whose defiance of Prussian censorship in the 1820s made him a regional hero, was a natural choice for a city asserting its identity under French occupation of the Rhineland.

Steel was the practical answer to hoarding: copper and nickel had long since been stripped from circulation by wartime requisition.