10 Pfennig

Ostseebad Müritz was a Baltic coastal resort town in Mecklenburg, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1922, it issued emergency small-denomination notes — Kleingeldscheine — to compensate for the catastrophic shortage of coin driven by hyperinflation stripping metal currency from circulation faster than the Reichsbank could respond. Egon Tschirch, a Stralsund-born painter with genuine regional standing, was a deliberate choice: resort towns issuing notgeld frequently commissioned local artists as a point of civic pride, and the resulting notes were aggressively collected as souvenirs even at the time of issue.

That dual purpose — functional emergency currency and collectible artifact — means many Müritz issues survived in near-unissued condition, pulled from circulation immediately by tourists.