20 Pfennig

Fürstenwalde an der Spree was a mid-sized Brandenburg town with enough industrial activity — notably its cable factory and rubber works — to sustain a meaningful local economy, which is part of why it issued Notgeld at all rather than relying solely on municipal scrip from larger neighboring centers. The printer, J. Adolf Schwarz of Lindenberg im Allgäu, was one of several small Bavarian printing houses that found steady business in the Notgeld boom of 1920–1922, producing small-denomination emergency paper for municipalities hundreds of kilometers away.

By 1921 the acute coin shortage that originally drove Notgeld issuance was easing, but municipal pride and collector demand had taken over — a commercially cynical but historically well-documented shift.