25 Pfennig

Geisa is a small town in the Rhön region of Thuringia, and like hundreds of similarly sized German municipalities in 1921, it issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — to compensate for a chronic shortage of small-denomination coins. The Reichsbank simply could not keep pace with postwar demand for fractional coinage, and local authorities filled the gap themselves. J. A. Schwarz of Lindenberg im Allgäu was a prolific printer of such notes, supplying dozens of towns across Germany with finished stock at a time when the Notgeld trade had become a minor industry in its own right.

Collectors drove much of the late Notgeld boom; many issues were printed in quantities well beyond local need, bought directly by philatelists and never spent.