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50 Pfennig
| Issuer | Stadtsparkasse Zörbig |
|---|---|
| Year | 1921 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Multicolour Notgeld issued by the city of Zörbig, with a light blue guilloche underprint and a decorative ivy-leaf border in green and black framing the entire note. At centre, a vignette of Zörbig's landmark church tower rises above a panoramic townscape; flanking it are two circular medallions — the left bearing the city's heraldic angel holding the municipal shield in orange and blue, the right carrying the seal of the Kuratorium der Sparkasse der Stadt Zoerbig with a winged head above a striped shield. A large hexagonal cartouche at centre displays the bold denomination numeral "50", with the legends NOTGELD DER STADT ZÖRBIG inscribed across the upper field. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse is printed in black, green, and red on white paper, with a decorative border of repeating geometric and foliate motifs in green and red. The central vignette, rendered in bold silhouette style, depicts a cloaked figure with outstretched arms surrounded by a crowd of armed townspeople, evoking a historical or legendary scene. Below the vignette, a text panel in Gothic Fraktur script carries a four-line verse quotation, with the denomination numeral "50" repeated in red within circular cartouches at left and right. |
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| Comments |
Zörbig is a small Saxony-Anhalt town with no particular monetary history of its own, which makes this note entirely a product of circumstance: the 1921 Kleingeldscheine wave, when hundreds of German municipalities and savings institutions printed emergency fractional currency to compensate for the chronic small-coin shortage that followed World War I. The Stadtsparkasse — a municipal savings bank, not a commercial bank — had no business issuing currency under normal conditions. The legal framework that briefly allowed it was itself temporary.
H. Schiebel in nearby Bitterfeld handled a number of these regional notgeld commissions. Provincial work, but competently executed for what it was.