50 Pfennig

Solnhofen is a small Bavarian municipality with a geological reputation far exceeding its administrative significance — the lithographic limestone quarried there gave Alois Senefelder the material for his invention of lithography in the late eighteenth century, and the same formation yielded the first confirmed Archaeopteryx specimen in 1861. None of that is why this note exists. It exists because the postwar coin shortage of 1921 left small municipalities scrambling to produce fractional emergency currency, and Louis Koch in Halberstadt was one of dozens of provincial printers servicing that demand.

The two manuscript signatures — Ohmann and Bornstr. — were applied individually to each note as a validation requirement, a labor-intensive practice that effectively limited issue quantities.