50 Mark Stadtsparkasse with signatures

Bielefeld's silk and linen notgeld issues from 1921–1923 occupy a peculiar corner of emergency currency history. The city's savings bank — not the municipal government directly — was the issuing authority, which was unusual enough, but the choice of woven silk as the substrate was a deliberate hedge against the paper shortages and counterfeiting risks that were making conventional notgeld increasingly untenable during the hyperinflationary spiral.

E. Gundlach A.G. was a local Bielefeld textile and printing firm, which made the production arrangement almost entirely self-contained within the city. The signatures on this example distinguish it from otherwise identical unsigned specimens in the series — a distinction that matters considerably to specialists tracking the various authorized release states.