20 Mark Ernst Moritz Arndt

Ernst Moritz Arndt was one of the more politically inconvenient figures the GDR chose to commemorate — a fierce German nationalist whose writings were as useful to 19th-century liberals as they were to 20th-century German nationalists of a very different stripe. East Germany's decision to issue this coin in 1985 came on the 200th anniversary of his birth, part of a broader cultural rehabilitation of pre-socialist German figures the regime had spent decades renegotiating into acceptable ideological territory.

Arndt had been banned from his professorship at Bonn by Prussian authorities in 1820 under the Carlsbad Decrees for his democratic agitation — a detail the GDR found worth emphasizing.