50 Pfennig

Alt Gaarz was a small Baltic resort village on the Mecklenburg lakeland, and its Badeverwaltung — the spa administration — was among thousands of German municipal and commercial bodies that issued Notgeld during the inflationary turbulence of the early 1920s. These local emergency notes were frequently treated as collectibles from the outset, printed in limited runs and sold to tourists as much as used in trade.

Egon Tschirch was a Rostock-based painter with genuine regional standing, and his involvement gives this note more artistic seriousness than most Kleingeldscheine of comparable origin. Three signatories for a 50 Pfennig spa note is a minor bureaucratic curiosity — suggesting the Badeverwaltung operated under formal collective oversight rather than a single administrator's authority.