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50 Pfennig

Issuer Stadtverwaltung Vegesack (City Administration of Vegesack)
Year 1921
Type Local banknote
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Obverse description Blue-ground note with a central vignette of a crossed anchor and lightning bolt surmounted by a cogwheel, rendered in yellow and black in an Expressionist graphic style. The denomination appears in two black-bordered diamond cartouches at left and right, each reading '50 Pf.' in bold yellow lettering on a red ground. The issuer's name and date arc across the upper field, with two manuscript signatures at upper right, a serial number at upper left, and the designer's name 'G. Bruckmeyer' at lower centre; a red-ground text panel at the base carries the redemption clause.
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Reverse description Light green-ground note with a bold Expressionist vignette of a stylised sailor in blue standing at centre, arms akimbo, before three large diamond-shaped sail forms in white, yellow, red and blue. Industrial harbour scenery — a smoking factory complex at left and a sailing vessel at right — frames the central figure against a stylised sea. Denomination diamond cartouches in black, red and yellow appear at upper left and right; two stanzas of Low German verse are inscribed in the lower lateral fields, and a broad blue text band across the full base reads 'GUTSCHEIN DER STADT VEGESACK'. A letter variety mark 'H.' appears at upper left.
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Comments

Vegesack was an independent port town on the Weser estuary north of Bremen — it would not be absorbed into Greater Bremen until 1939. This note dates from the peak of Germany's early postwar Kleingeldnot, the small-change shortage that prompted thousands of German municipalities to issue their own Notgeld after federal coinage vanished from circulation through hoarding and metal requisitioning.

Gaster & Söhne were a Bremen commercial printer, not a specialist banknote house, and the relatively modest production values of this series reflect that. Bruckmeyer's design credit is unusually specific for a municipal issue of this type — most Notgeld printers absorbed design costs anonymously into the job.

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