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25 Pfennig
| Issuer | Municipality of Helgoland (Gemeinde Helgoland) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1921 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette within an oval frame shows a haloed saint — Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors — rendered in a folkloristic Art Nouveau style, standing before the bicoloured (green over white) arms of Helgoland, holding a staff and a platter with fish. Flanking the oval are seaweed fronds, marine shells, a starfish, and two fish vignettes in the upper corners. The denomination legend in Gothic script appears on a banner across the top, the serial number and date 'im April 1921' are printed below, and the printer's imprint 'DRUCK A. SCHWARZ · LINDENBERG · ALLGÄU' runs along the bottom margin. Frisian-dialect inscriptions in two columns flank the lower portion of the central vignette. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The central field carries a detailed landscape vignette of the famous Lange Anna (Großer Holm) sea stack off Helgoland, rendered in fine letterpress line work with light green tonal underprint. A caption in Frisian dialect identifying the formation appears above the vignette. Marine fauna — a fish at lower left and a lobster at lower right — border the scene within a red-ruled rectangular frame. Denomination panels reading '25 Pfennig' in green Gothic numerals and lettering appear in the upper left and upper right corners, and a four-line Frisian verse runs across the top of the note. The issuer's name 'Insel Helgoland' is printed in large Gothic script along the bottom. |
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| Comments |
Helgoland's notgeld issues are among the more geographically distinctive of the Weimar-era emergency money series — the island had been British territory from 1807 to 1890, handed back to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar and other East African concessions under the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty. By 1921, the municipality was issuing its own fractional currency like hundreds of other small German communities squeezed by the postwar coin shortage.
Heinz Schiestl was a Würzburg-based artist and book illustrator with Catholic devotional work at his core — an unusual choice for municipal notgeld, though Bavarian printers like A. Schwarz in Lindenberg regularly commissioned established regional artists for collector-oriented series. These later notgeld issues were frequently designed with philatelic collectors in mind rather than everyday commerce.