1 Pfennig - Oberzwieselau Benedikt v. Poschinger

Issued by the Poschinger glassworks at Oberzwieselau during the acute metal shortages of the First World War, this piece is Notgeld in its most localized form — a private industrial token produced so that a single factory could keep paying its workers when the imperial coinage system could no longer supply enough small change. The Poschinger family had operated glassmaking on the Bavarian Forest site since the seventeenth century, and by 1917 the works were sufficiently large to require their own internal monetary infrastructure.