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42 Goldpfennig
| Issuer | Bezirksamt Laufen (District Office of Laufen, Bavaria) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1923 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | The upper half of the note is occupied by a detailed letterpress vignette of the town of Laufen as seen from across the Salzach river, with the prominent church steeple and rooftops rendered against a mountainous horizon. To the lower left stands a polychrome portrait vignette of Saint Rupertus (St. Rupert of Salzburg) in episcopal vestments with the legend 'St. RUPERTUS' below, while to the lower right appears the blue-and-white lozenge arms of Bavaria flanked by a lion supporter. The denomination '42 Goldpfennig gleich Dollar: 1/10' is set in bold letterpress typeface at centre, above a block of German redemption text dated Laufen, 26. November 1923, with manuscript signatures of district officials below. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The entire reverse is printed in green on cream paper and consists of a dense, all-over guilloche underprint composed of a uniform grid of small square panels each containing interlocking foliate and floral ornaments. At the centre of the field a larger circular guilloche rosette with a geometric star motif is superimposed over the tiled background, providing the principal anti-counterfeiting element. No text or denomination appears on the reverse. |
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| Comments |
The Goldpfennig denomination is the detail that matters here. During the hyperinflation of 1923, German municipal and district authorities scrambled to issue notgeld denominated in stable units rather than the collapsing Papiermark — gold-based denominations were a deliberate signal of reliability, however nominal, at a moment when the Reichsmark was being reprinted daily with additional zeros.
Bezirksamt Laufen was a small administrative district in Upper Bavaria near the Austrian border. Local print runs for issues like this were typically modest, produced by regional printers with whatever materials were at hand — which accounts for the variation in paper quality and guilloche fidelity seen across surviving examples of Bavarian district notgeld from this period.