25 Pfennig Notables and Sights Series - Issue 5 - Marlitt

Arnstadt's fifth notgeld issue honors E. Marlitt — the pen name of Eugenie John, who was born in Arnstadt in 1825 and became one of the best-selling serialized novelists in 19th-century Germany, her fiction running in the family magazine Die Gartenlaube to enormous readership. A local celebrity commemorated on emergency small change is not unusual for Thuringian notgeld, but the choice of a woman writer over the more predictable Bach connection — Arnstadt being where Johann Sebastian Bach served as organist from 1703 — is a deliberate civic statement.

A. Paul Weber, later known primarily as a graphic satirist and printmaker, designed this series early in his career.