ECU Braunschweig

The ECU coinage series issued by Germany in the 1990s had no legal tender status and no official backing from the Bundesbank — these were privately authorized medal-coins sold to collectors as the Maastricht Treaty made a unified European currency politically unavoidable. Braunschweig was chosen as a subject because the city's medieval trade connections made it a plausible symbol of pan-European commerce, however loosely that argument holds.

The ECU itself was a basket currency, not a coin of account anyone actually spent.