1 Pfennig - Berlin Kaufhaus Gebrüder Leyser

Kaufhaus Gebrüder Leyser was a Berlin department store that issued private token currency — Warengeld — during the acute small-change shortages that plagued Germany in the early Weimar period. Retailers of sufficient scale were effectively forced to manufacture their own fractional currency when the Reichsbank could not keep pace with denominations too small to bother printing on paper. The zinc composition is characteristic of wartime and immediate postwar austerity, copper being far too strategically valuable for commercial token production.