20 Pfennig

Schmiedefeld am Rennsteig is a small Thuringian village on the ridge road that historically divided Franconia from Thuringia. This note belongs to the vast wave of Kleingeldersatz — small-change substitutes — issued by German municipalities between roughly 1916 and 1922, when coin metal was requisitioned for war production and fractional currency effectively vanished from circulation. Graphische Werkstätten in nearby Ilmenau printed a significant volume of these local emergency issues for surrounding Thuringian communities, which is why the typography and layout often feel consistent across notes from entirely different issuing bodies.

Schmiedefeld's issues are not among the series that attracted heavy collector speculation during the 1920s Notgeld mania, which means survivors tend to be genuinely used examples rather than the printer's remainders sold directly to collectors that inflate survival rates for more prominent towns.