75 Pfennig

Rathenow, a small Brandenburg city on the Havel River, was already the dominant center of German optical instrument manufacturing by the early 1920s — the industry had been there since the late eighteenth century. That local identity almost certainly shaped the design choices the municipality made when commissioning this notgeld series from Carl Flemming & T. C. Wiskott, a Silesian printing firm that handled a substantial volume of the emergency currency boom following the postwar inflation surge.

The 1921 notgeld wave was partly practical and partly philatelic speculation — municipalities knew collectors were buying, and print runs were sized accordingly. Glogau, now Głogów, was German territory at the time of printing.