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50 Pfennigs
| Issuer | Stadt Artern (City of Artern) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1921 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Brown letterpress Notgeld note centered on a silhouette portrait of Goethe in an oval vignette, flanked by line-art vignettes of two Artern buildings labeled 'Zur Krone' and 'Goethehaus'. Denomination '50 Pfennige' appears in decorative cartouches at lower left and right. Multi-stanza verse text, validity inscription 'Gültig bis Sylvester 1921', town name 'Artern i. Thüringen', and two facsimile signatures with the Artern municipal arms are printed below. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Polychrome vignette in green and brown tones enclosed within a rectangular frame, surrounded by an elaborate acanthus-leaf and thistle-blossom border. The central scene depicts two figures — a seated man and woman in 18th-century costume — conversing before a rustic courtyard, illustrating a scene from Goethe's 'Hermann und Dorothea'. |
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| Comments |
Artern is a small salt-mining town in Thuringia, and like hundreds of German municipalities in 1921, it issued Notgeld simply because the Reichsbank couldn't produce small-denomination coinage fast enough to meet demand during the post-WWI inflation spiral. These municipal issues were authorized under emergency provisions but operated with almost no central oversight, which is why quality and design ambition varied so wildly from one town to the next.
Artern's series is among the more locally specific of the Thuringian issues, drawing on the town's salt extraction history rather than generic patriotic imagery. Collector demand for the 1921 Notgeld wave dried up almost immediately after the 1923 hyperinflation rendered the entire class of emergency paper obsolete.