50 Pfennig

Emmendingen's 1917 Kleingeldschein belongs to the enormous wave of municipal emergency currency that flooded Germany after small coins vanished from circulation — hoarded by a public who understood that metal had intrinsic value and paper did not. By mid-1917, over three thousand German municipalities had resorted to printing their own fractional notes, making most issues from this period common in the absolute sense, though individual town issues can be surprisingly difficult to locate today.

The Stadtkasse, not a bank, was the issuing body — a civic treasury function that had no business printing currency under normal circumstances. That administrative awkwardness is itself the story here.