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50 Pfennig
| Issuer | Stadt Zons (City of Zons) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1921 |
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| Composition | Paper |
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| Obverse description | Purple and orange Notgeld note with a central vignette of the Zons city coat of arms — a mounted knight with a child on foot, surmounted by a crenellated tower gateway. A decorative ribbon banner arches across the upper field bearing the issuer's title in gothic script. The denomination numeral '50' appears twice in large white letterpress on either side of the central arms, with 'Pfennig' inscribed below each numeral. A text panel at the base states the redemption terms, date of issue, and carries the facsimile signature of the Bürgermeister. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | Rheinturm. Lieben Freunde, es gab schönre Zeiten Als die unsern, Das ist nicht zu streiten! Schiller. |
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| Comments |
Zons — the medieval walled town on the Rhine south of Düsseldorf — issued this note during the great German notgeld wave of the early 1920s, when hundreds of small municipalities printed their own emergency fractional currency to fill the void left by an acute shortage of official small-denomination coins. By 1921 the Reichsbank had largely stopped producing low-value coinage as inflation eroded its worth before it could circulate.
Dr. Linnemann & Co. in Cologne handled a considerable volume of Rhineland notgeld commissions during this period. Designer H. Lütkens's involvement suggests the city paid for something above the bare minimum — Zons was already trading on its unusually intact medieval fortifications as a point of civic pride.