25 Pfennig Buchhandlung Alfred Adolph

Tarnowitz — now Tarnowskie Góry in southern Poland — was part of Upper Silesia, a region whose political fate was being decided by plebiscite in March 1921 when this note was almost certainly printed. The area's notgeld output that year was enormous, partly practical and partly propagandist, as German businesses flooded the zone with locally-issued scrip to assert economic normalcy under German administration.

Louis Koch in Halberstadt was a competent provincial printer with a solid notgeld client list. Buchhandlung Alfred Adolph was a bookseller — an unusual issuer even by the loose standards of 1921 emergency coinage.