10 Pfennig - Karlsruhe Louis L. Stern and Co

Louis L. Stern & Co. was a major textile and department store operation in Karlsruhe, and like hundreds of German retailers during the material shortages of World War I, it issued private emergency currency — Notgeld — to compensate for the acute scarcity of small change that followed government requisitioning of copper and nickel coinage. Zinc was the compromise metal of the home front.

These merchant tokens occupy an awkward category: legally tolerated, functionally necessary, redeemable only at the issuing firm.