25 Pfennig

Mayen is a small town in the Eifel region of the Rhineland, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1919, its savings bank issued emergency fractional notes — Notgeld — to address the acute shortage of small-denomination coinage that had plagued circulation since the war years. The Reichsbank had neither the metal nor the logistical capacity to keep pfennig coins in supply, and local institutions filled the gap themselves.

The Städtische Sparkasse series from Mayen is unremarkable within the broader Notgeld output of that year, which ran into the thousands of distinct issues across Germany. Collector demand for these was recognized almost immediately — some municipalities printed intentional overruns for the philatelic trade rather than genuine circulation needs.