1 Mark

Wesselburen is a small market town in Schleswig-Holstein, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities in 1921, it resorted to printing its own emergency paper — Notgeld — as the Reichsbank struggled to keep small-denomination coinage in circulation during the postwar inflation spiral. These town-issued notes were technically obligations of the municipal authority, not the central banking system, meaning redemption depended entirely on local fiscal health. Many were never redeemed at all.

Schleswig-Holstein had only recently been partitioned following the 1920 plebiscite, and municipal finances across the region were in flux. Wesselburen's note entered circulation in that uncertain administrative moment.