50 Pfennig Humboldt Series - Issue 2

Schwarzburg notgeld was issued by the municipality sitting at the base of the Schwarzburg castle complex in the Thuringian highlands — a small community that nonetheless produced some of the more carefully printed emergency currency of the 1921–22 inflationary wave. The Humboldt Series is named for Alexander von Humboldt, whose connection to Thuringia is tenuous at best, suggesting the series was conceived more as a collectible set than a functional payment instrument. By 1922, much notgeld was being issued explicitly for the collector trade, with municipalities splitting print runs into numbered issues to generate revenue.

Eduard Giltsch was a respected Jena printing house with a background in fine academic and scientific illustration — an unusual choice that likely accounts for the series' above-average print quality.