10 Pfennig Buchhandlung Alfred Adolph

Tarnowitz — today Tarnowskie Góry in southern Poland — was a German-administered industrial town in Upper Silesia when this note was issued. The summer of 1921 placed it at the center of one of the most contested border disputes in postwar Europe: the Upper Silesia plebiscite had just been held in March, with the partition decision still pending. Small traders like Alfred Adolph's bookshop issued emergency Kleingeld not merely because of the national coin shortage, but because economic uncertainty in the region made even minor transactions genuinely difficult.

Louis Koch in Halberstadt was a reliable small-run Notgeld printer handling dozens of such municipal and commercial commissions during the 1921 peak. The DeNG reference suffix "1a" typically indicates a specific paper or color variant within the series.