50 Pfennig Archive Series - Issue 2: Luther

Mühlhausen has a complicated relationship with Martin Luther — he famously preached there in 1523, attempting to mediate during the Peasants' War, but ultimately sided against Thomas Müntzer's radical movement that used the city as its revolutionary base. The municipal authority's decision to feature Luther on a Notgeld issue in 1921 was therefore not neutral local pride; it was a pointed ideological choice in a city whose reformist history runs in two very different directions.

Chr. Gerlach was a local Mühlhausen printer, and M. E. Beyrer's design work on this archive series gives it a more considered graphic character than most municipal emergency issues of the period.