50 Pfennig Kyffhäuser Series

Frankenhausen's 1921 Notgeld series takes its name from the Kyffhäuser monument on the ridge above the town — the massive late-nineteenth-century memorial built over the ruins of an imperial Hohenstaufen palace, where legend holds Frederick Barbarossa sleeps beneath the mountain waiting to return. The choice was locally resonant: Frankenhausen sat directly in the monument's shadow and had been marketing the site to tourists for decades.

Germ. Germeyer of Berlin was a minor but active Notgeld printer during the 1920–1922 issue peak. The watermarked paper on this series is a cut above the cheapest emergency issues of the period — not all municipal Notgeld bothered with any security feature at all. Designer H. L. Braune is credited in the series, which is more attribution than most city-issued Kleingeldersatz received.