1 Mark Cafe Orth

Café Orth was among dozens of German commercial establishments that issued their own emergency currency during the notgeld period, when wartime and postwar coin shortages left retailers unable to make change. That this particular piece was printed by Konrad Hanf in Hamburg places it within the recognizable network of small Hamburg printers who handled notgeld commissions for businesses throughout Schleswig-Holstein in the early 1920s.

Westerland, on the North Frisian island of Sylt, was already a fashionable North Sea resort by this period — the clientele of a café there would have been predominantly seasonal visitors, which raises the practical question of how far these tokens actually circulated before being redeemed or simply pocketed as curiosities.