10 Pfennig

Schalkau is a small town in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities across Germany in 1918, it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — to compensate for the acute shortage of small-denomination coins caused by wartime metal requisitioning. The Reichsbank had effectively stopped supplying fractional coinage, leaving towns to fend for themselves.

First-wave 1918 municipal Notgeld of this type was purely functional, printed locally with minimal artistic ambition. The elaborate collector-oriented series came later, mostly in 1921–1922.