10 Mark

Traunstein is a small Bavarian market town near the Austrian border, and its municipal administration had no business issuing currency — yet the collapse of the Kaiserreich and the catastrophic coin shortage of 1919 left local authorities across Germany doing exactly that. This note belongs to the Notgeld wave that swept Bavaria in the immediate post-war period, when centralized monetary authority had effectively dissolved and communities printed what they needed to keep commerce moving.

The DeNG 3 reference places this firmly in the documented Bavarian municipal series, though Traunstein's issues are uncommon finds outside regional collections. The official seal as the sole security feature reflects how improvised these instruments were — a wax or ink stamp being the only thing standing between a town's scrip and outright forgery.