1 Mark

The Swakopmunder Buchhandlung — a bookshop and stationery business in Swakopmund — issued its own emergency currency during the First World War because it had to. After South African forces took German South West Africa in 1915, the territory's financial infrastructure collapsed and small change became scarce almost immediately. Local merchants stepped in with privately printed Notgeld to keep commerce moving.

These are among the most geographically remote privately issued notes of the entire war. Printed on the spot by the same press that handled the shop's commercial stationery, they were redeemable only at the issuing establishment — a limitation that did little to discourage wider circulation in a town that had few alternatives.