10 Pfennig - Kötzting

Kötzting is a small market town in the Bavarian Forest, and this zinc piece is notgeld — emergency money issued during the acute coin shortage that gripped Germany after World War I. Municipalities, businesses, and even private individuals were authorized to fill the gap left by hoarded metal coinage. Zinc was the material of necessity: cheap, available, and deeply unpopular with the public, who associated it with the degraded wartime issues they had spent years tolerating.