20 Mark

Kamenz, a small Saxon town best known as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's birthplace, issued this note during the autumn 1918 Notgeld wave that swept German municipalities as the Imperial government's financial machinery collapsed in the war's final weeks. Municipal councils across Saxony were suddenly responsible for local liquidity, and city-owned or contracted print shops — Ratsdruckerei means roughly "council printing office" — became de facto currency producers almost overnight.

The use of R. Dulce in Glauchau, rather than a Leipzig or Dresden house, is typical of Saxon provincial contracting. The watermarked paper is the one concession to anti-counterfeiting discipline in what was otherwise an improvised system.