1 Mark

Düren's 1918 emergency issues belong to the Notgeld wave that swept German municipalities as the Imperial government's coin supply collapsed in the final year of the war. Cities, towns, and even individual firms printed their own fractional notes because there was simply nothing else to make change with — the metal had long since gone to the war effort.

Stadt Düren sat at the heart of a major textile and metals manufacturing region in the Rhineland, which made functional small-denomination scrip a practical necessity rather than a collector curiosity. Whether this 1 Mark piece was redeemed after the November armistice or simply abandoned as inflation made all fixed-denomination paper worthless within a few years is, for most surviving examples, impossible to determine.