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25 Pfennig
| Issuer | Stadt- und Landkreis Aachen |
|---|---|
| Year | 1918 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Printed in dark brown on orange-tan paper, the note carries a decorative guilloche border with the Aachen eagle vignette in circular cartouches at each upper corner. The heading "STADT- UND LANDKREIS AACHEN" runs across the top within a hatched panel, below which the denomination "Fünfundzwanzig Pfennig" is rendered in large Gothic script flanked by ornamental scrollwork. The body text sets out the conditions of acceptance by all public cashiers of the Stadt- und Landkreis Aachen, followed by two manuscript signatures above two red official seals, the date "Aachen, den 31. Oktober 1918", and a red series designation; the year "1918" appears in the lower border panel, with the printer's imprint "J. P. Bachem, Köln" at the foot. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Printed in a single orange-tan tone, the reverse is dominated by a central oval vignette of the Aachen Town Hall (Rathaus), rendered in fine letterpress line work and set within a scalloped cartouche. Flanking the central vignette are two symmetrical guilloche rosettes, with the numeral "25" worked into the guilloche on each side, all against a wave-pattern underprint that fills the entire field. |
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| Comments |
Aachen's municipal Notgeld of 1918 sits at the intersection of military occupation anxiety and a genuine small-change crisis — by mid-1918, silver and even base-metal coins had effectively vanished from everyday commerce across Germany, hoarded or melted down, forcing hundreds of municipalities to print their own low-denomination paper. Aachen's situation carried extra weight: the city sat directly on the Belgian and Dutch borders, and the Reichsbank's distribution failures hit frontier districts harder than most.
J. P. Bachem was a well-established Catholic publishing house in Cologne, pressed into Notgeld production alongside its normal print work. Their output is generally clean but not engraved — lithographic commercial work rather than security printing.