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2 Mark
| Issuer | Magistrat der Stadt Beckum |
|---|---|
| Year | 1918 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Vertically oriented multicolour reverse printed in ochre, green and brown tones, its full height occupied by a large satirical vignette illustrating the Beckum 'grass-smelling' legend: a crowd of townsfolk haul on a rope attached to a donkey clambering up a church tower, with a medieval townscape visible in the background. The city's heraldic shield appears in a cartouche at the top, flanked by the Latin motto 'Oh! Sancta simplicitas!' in a banner. Denomination numerals '2' in ornate Gothic type flank the composition at mid-height, and a prose caption in German explaining the scene is set in a rectangular text panel at centre-lower, above the value '2 Mark' in a scroll at the foot. |
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| Protection type | Embossed stamp |
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| Comments |
Beckum is a small Westphalian town, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1918, its Magistrat was forced into emergency currency issuance as the Reichsbank struggled to keep small-denomination coinage in circulation during the war's final year. These Kommunale Notgeldscheine filled a genuine transactional gap — not commemorative pieces, not speculation, but workaday scrip pressed into service at butcher counters and market stalls.
The embossed stamp was the issuing authority's primary fraud deterrent, cheaper and faster to apply than serial numbering or printed signatures. Beckum's 2 Mark sits at the upper end of the denominations most towns dared to issue — anything higher risked public refusal.