5 Deutsche Mark Immanuel Kant

Issued to mark the 250th anniversary of Kant's birth, this is one of a long run of West German commemorative 5-Mark pieces struck in lower-grade silver — a deliberate policy shift from the higher fineness used in earlier issues, driven by rising silver prices through the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kant was born in Königsberg in 1724, a city that by 1974 had been Soviet Kaliningrad for nearly three decades, lending the commemoration an unspoken political edge the Bonn government left entirely unremarked.