10 Pfennig - Eslarn Hans Müller

Eslarn is a small market town in the Upper Palatinate, and this zinc notgeld piece was almost certainly issued during the acute small-change shortage that gripped Germany between 1917 and 1921, when base-metal coinage virtually disappeared from circulation as the war and its aftermath drained municipal and commercial reserves. Private merchants — Hans Müller among them — issued their own emergency tokens to make transactions possible at all. Zinc was the material of necessity, not choice.