50 Pfennig - Marbach Friedrich Schiller

Marbach am Neckar issued this notgeld piece in 1918 under the pressures of wartime metal shortages that had stripped Germany's small municipalities of viable coinage. The town's choice to invoke Friedrich Schiller — born there in 1759 — was hardly accidental; local identity politics around Schiller had been a civic fixture since the Schiller centenary celebrations of 1859, and the Schillermuseum had opened in Marbach just eleven years before this coin was struck. Iron was the only practical option by late 1918, zinc and aluminium having already been heavily requisitioned.