10 Mark

The Kreisausschuss des Kreises Steinburg — the district committee of Steinburg, in Schleswig-Holstein — issued this note as Notgeld during the final weeks of the First World War, when small-denomination coinage had effectively disappeared from circulation across Germany. The printer, J.J. Augustin of Glückstadt, was a well-established regional press that handled a significant volume of local emergency currency in the north German states during this period.

The designer credit is the more interesting detail. Wenzel August Hablik was a Czech-born Expressionist artist who had settled in Itzehoe, the Steinburg district seat, and would go on to become one of the more distinctive figures associated with the Expressionist Utopian movement. His involvement in a local Notgeld commission was not unusual for the time — municipalities often turned to local artists — but Hablik's aesthetic sensibility ran considerably deeper than most who took on such work.

The watermarked paper was supplied to provide minimal security against forgery, a standard precaution even for notes intended as purely temporary instruments.