50 Pfennig

Schafstädt is a small town in the Saalekreis district of Saxony-Anhalt, and this note is a product of the Kleingeldersatz crisis that gripped Germany from 1918 onward — the near-total disappearance of coins from circulation as metal was hoarded or consumed by wartime industry. Thousands of German municipalities resorted to printing their own fractional paper, and the Magistrat here commissioned Adolf Forker of Leipzig, a printer with a substantial Notgeld client list during this period.

Forker-produced municipal issues tend to be competently lithographed but rarely distinguished. The 1920 date places this in the later wave of Kleingeld Notgeld, by which point the novelty-collector market had begun distorting production volumes.