5 Mark blue on blue

Gera was the capital of the small Thuringian principality of Reuss-Schleiz, and when the postwar currency chaos of 1918–1919 stripped German municipalities of reliable small change, local authorities across the region issued their own emergency paper — Notgeld. The City of Gera's 5 Mark piece is among the more formally produced examples of the type, printed locally rather than farmed out to one of the larger commercial presses, and incorporating a watermark at a moment when most municipal issuers were cutting every possible corner.

The Gigante reference places this firmly within the Italian collectors' tradition of cataloguing German Notgeld — an index of how broadly this material dispersed into European collections after the inflation years.