50 Pfennig Luther Jubilee Series

Issued in 1921 to mark the 400th anniversary of Luther's appearance before the Diet of Worms, this Notgeld series was a deliberate act of civic promotion by Eisenach — the city where Luther attended school as a boy and where the Wartburg looms above the skyline. The Luther Jubilee provided dozens of German municipalities with a pretext to issue commemorative small-change notes, but Eisenach had a more legitimate claim than most.

The handmade paper with watermark is worth noting: J. Adolf Schwarz in Lindenberg im Allgäu was a specialist printer whose Notgeld output often used higher-grade stock than the mass-produced issues flooding the market that year. The watermarked handmade paper on this series is an uncommon specification for 50-Pfennig emergency currency.