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1 Mark
| Issuer | Municipality of Helgoland |
|---|---|
| Year | 1920 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | The central vignette presents St. Nicholas, patron saint of fishermen, rendered in letterpress with three pegs on his chest as a traditional iconographic attribute. Issued in December 1920 as Notgeld commemorating the 200th anniversary of the catastrophic New Year's flood of 31 December 1720 to 1 January 1721, the design reflects both the island's maritime heritage and the commemorative purpose of the note. The composition is framed with typographic border elements characteristic of municipal emergency currency of the period. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | ROAD ES DE KANT · WIT ES DET SUNN · GRÖNN ES DET LUNN · PANT HELIGE LUNN · Insel Helgoland |
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| Comments |
Helgoland's notgeld issues of 1920 occupy a peculiar corner of German emergency money. The island had been British territory from 1807 until 1890, when Germany exchanged Zanzibar and other East African concessions for it under the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty — a swap that struck many contemporaries as spectacularly lopsided. By 1920 it was a German municipality scraping together its own paper to cover a coin shortage, like hundreds of other small issuers that year.
J. Adolf Schwarz of Lindenberg im Allgäu was a minor regional printer responsible for a number of Bavarian and southwestern German notgeld runs. Nothing about this production is exceptional, but the issuing authority — a wind-battered North Sea island of barely a square kilometer — is not one you encounter often in notgeld inventories.