5 Mark

Wittenberg issued its own emergency currency — Notgeld — during the hyperinflationary spiral of the early Weimar Republic, when the Reichsbank's supply of small denomination notes could not keep pace with collapsing purchasing power. Municipal and commercial authorities across Germany filled the gap with locally printed scrip, most of it never intended to survive long in circulation. The 1922 issues came at a particularly unstable moment: the mark had already lost most of its prewar value, and the worst was still to come.

The split designer credits — "BHD" for the obverse, "Christophe" for the reverse — suggest two different hands on a single note, unusual enough to be worth noting. The watermarked paper implies a degree of production care that many contemporary Notgeld issues dispensed with entirely.