5 Mark

Issued by the joint district communities of Lindau and Weiler during the acute coin shortage that gripped Germany in the final year of the First World War, this is a genuinely local Notgeld — not the decorative collector-oriented issues that flooded the market from 1920 onward, but an actual emergency instrument pressed into daily use when small-denomination coinage had effectively vanished from circulation. The printing by J. Adolf Schwarz in nearby Lindenberg im Allgäu kept production close to home, a practical necessity in a period when transport and supply chains were badly disrupted.

The official stamp serves as the sole security feature — thin protection, but typical of hastily authorized municipal scrip where the issuing authority's legitimacy was local and unquestioned.