50 Pfennig - Steinwiesen

Steinwiesen is a small village in Upper Franconia, Bavaria, and this zinc piece belongs to the vast wave of German municipal notgeld issued between 1919 and 1922 when chronic small-change shortages — caused first by wartime metal hoarding, then by postwar monetary instability — forced local governments to produce their own emergency coinage. Thousands of municipalities did the same, but zinc was an unusual choice; most comparable issues used iron or aluminum. The Funck reference places this squarely within the catalogued series, suggesting production was organized rather than improvised.