Catalog
10 Pfennig
| Issuer | Stadt Krakow am See (City of Krakow am See) |
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| Year | |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Brown letterpress Notgeld note with a large woodcut-style vignette of a dense forest scene occupying the upper two-thirds of the face, printed against a plain rectangular background with a faint salmon-toned panel at upper right. Below the vignette, the validity text and issuing authority inscription appear alongside a manuscript signature, followed by the large numeral '10' at lower left and the denomination 'PFENNIG' in bold Gothic type across the foot. A six-line Low German verse in Fraktur script occupies the lower centre panel. |
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| Reverse description | Brown letterpress reverse with an overall wave-pattern guilloche border filling the entire field. A trapezoidal central vignette presents a panoramic landscape view of low hills and open terrain rendered in fine crosshatch engraving. The large numeral '10' in outline type appears above the vignette, while bold block lettering below reads 'PFENNIG', 'REUTERGELD', and 'KRAKOW' in three stacked lines. |
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| Comments |
Krakow am See is a small town in Mecklenburg, entirely unrelated to the Polish city of Kraków — a confusion that has inflated collector interest in this note well beyond what the issue itself warrants. The name derives from a Slavic root meaning "crow," common in the region's pre-German settlement layer. This 10 Pfennig note is a piece of German Notgeld, the emergency small-change paper that flooded circulation after metal coinage disappeared during and after the First World War.
Municipal issues like this one were printed in enormous variety and frequently collected as sets, meaning many examples survived uncirculated — not because of rarity, but because collectors bought them directly from town halls.