300 000 Mark Marktsparkasse

Langquaid is a small market town in Lower Bavaria, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities in 1923, its local savings institution — the Marktsparkasse — was forced into the notgeld business simply to keep commerce moving. By mid-1923, Reichsbank notes were arriving in denominations so far behind actual prices that even a village sparkasse had to print its own emergency paper. The 300,000 Mark denomination places this squarely in the hyperinflation peak, when that figure represented roughly the cost of a loaf of bread for only days before it didn't.

Printed by Heinrich Schiele's graphic arts firm in Regensburg, a house that handled numerous regional Bavarian notgeld commissions that year.