1 Gold Mark Stadtsparkasse

Bielefeld's famous series of fabric-based emergency currency — Stoffgeld — emerged from the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, when the municipal savings bank contracted local textile manufacturer E. Gundlach to produce notes on woven linen. The choice was partly practical: paper supplies were unreliable and linen offered a durability that pulp simply couldn't. But it was also a pointed statement about the town's industrial identity, rooted in the linen trade since the medieval period.

Linen notes from this series are among the more collectible pieces of German Notgeld purely because of their material survival rate — fabric degrades differently than paper, and examples that spent time folded in wallets show characteristic weave stress at the crease lines rather than the fiber tears typical of paper currency.