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20 000 000 000 Mark
| Issuer | Stadtkasse Mosbach (City Treasury of Mosbach) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | The city coat of arms of Mosbach — an eagle in a shield with a smaller inset shield — appears in the upper right corner, framed by a wavy and dotted border that runs the full perimeter of the note. A yellow-brown tinted vignette of an old town streetscape, likely the historic city hall, forms the central underprint. In the lower left corner, the circular municipal seal is partially visible in purple ink. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse carries a letterpress vignette of the Götzenburg, the medieval castle near Neckarzimmern associated with the imperial knight Götz von Berlichingen, rendered in a fine line illustrative style. The castle view is accompanied by a verse text block occupying the lower portion of the note, set in a decorative typeface. The overall layout is unframed, with the inscription and image integrated in a single compositional field. |
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| Comments |
Mosbach is a small town in Baden — not a major banking center, not an industrial hub. That a municipal treasury there was issuing twenty-billion-mark denominations in late 1923 tells you more about the collapse of the German mark than any economic chart can. Local authorities across Germany were authorized to print their own emergency currency, Notgeld, when the Reichsbank simply could not supply enough physical notes to keep pace with daily price inflation that was, by October 1923, roughly doubling every four days.
The watermarked paper is worth noting — many comparable municipal issues used whatever stock was available, so the inclusion of a security feature here suggests Mosbach drew on a printer with access to proper banknote-grade materials rather than improvising entirely.