5 Pfennig - Rudolstadt Charlotte v. Schiller

Rudolstadt issued this iron notgeld piece in 1920 as part of the wave of municipal emergency coinage that flooded Germany following the metal shortages and economic dislocation of the First World War. The city's invocation of Charlotte von Schiller — née von Lengefeld, who married Friedrich Schiller in Rudolstadt's Stadtkirche in 1790 — reflects the town's deliberate effort to tie its emergency currency to local cultural prestige at a moment when the central state's monetary authority had badly eroded.