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50 Pfennig
| Issuer | Stadt Wanfried (City of Wanfried) |
|---|---|
| Year | |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette presents a lithographed panoramic townscape of Wanfried as rendered by Merian in 1646, with sailing vessels on the river in the foreground and a church spire rising above the rooftops against a mountainous backdrop. The inscription 'Wanfried i. Jahre 1646 nach Merian' appears below the vignette, flanked on the left and right by the vertically arranged Fraktur legends 'Not / Der / Stadt' and 'Geld / Wan- / fried'. A lower text panel in cursive script carries the validity clause signed by the Magistrat, with the printer's imprint 'Lith. u. Druck P. Israel, Wanfried a/W.' at the lower right; the entire design is printed in blue and black on cream paper within a blue border. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | 50 Pf. Stadt Wanfried. STADT WANFRIED · SIEGEL DER · 16 08 |
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| Comments |
Wanfried is a small town on the Werra river in Hesse, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities, it resorted to locally printed Notgeld during the acute small-change shortages of 1917–1922. Having the note printed by P. Israel — a local firm in Wanfried itself — was common practice for towns too small or too cash-strapped to commission work from the major Notgeld printers in Leipzig or Berlin. Local printing kept costs down but meant quality control varied enormously across runs.
Wanfried sits directly on what became the inner-German border after 1945, the Werra forming the boundary between West and East Germany at that point — a detail that lends the town an odd historical afterlife entirely unconnected to its Notgeld.