10 Pfennig

Sonneberg's 1921 Kleingeldschein series belongs to the vast wave of municipal emergency money that flooded Germany as post-WWI coin shortages made small-denomination transactions nearly impossible. What distinguishes this particular note is the fully local production chain — designed by Carl Glaudinner and printed by August Eichhorn, both working within Sonneberg itself, which was unusual even among Notgeld issues, most of which were farmed out to larger regional printers in Leipzig or Jena.

Sonneberg was the center of Germany's toy industry, a fact that gives the town's wartime and postwar economic dislocation a particular character — export markets had collapsed, and by 1921 inflation was accelerating toward the catastrophe that would arrive in 1923.