We all know about the hyper-inflation which hit post-Great-War Germany in the early 1920s, when people ended up pushing wheelbarrows full of billion-Mark notes around just to buy a loaf of bread, I thought this exhibition would be a mildly interesting display of those notes, but it is something much more interesting, stimulating and fun.
Notgeld
Notgeld is German for ’emergency money’ or ‘necessity money’. During the First World War and afterwards, as the national economy came under increasing strain, many German towns issued their own emergency money, aiming to address shortages of small denomination notes and coins and at a purely local level. Different towns and localities produced works which promoted or referenced their distinctive attractions or products. Designs quickly became sophisticated and the notes became collectible.
The point is that what started out as fugitive ‘money’, designed to be used as the small change of daily life, ended up becoming a hugely varied, inventive and entertaining social history of the period 1914 to 1924.
The British Museum has one of the largest collections of Notgeld in the UK and this exhibition brings together 100 or so examples of Notgeld with really useful wall labels setting the social and economic context and then detailed labels for each of the notes, explaining their design elements.
A 500 mark note made out of silk from Bielefeld. The note included an anti-American and laments the decay of (Christian) morals during the inflation © Trustees of the British Museum
Social issues
There are notes featuring local landmarks, designs which comment on social issues such as the Turnip Notgeld lamenting the disastrous food shortage of 1917. In one design on display an artist included a hidden message, criticising the dire food situation in Germany in the winter of 1917, the so-called ‘Turnip Winter’. Hidden within the seal of the town, the artist included the words ‘sweet hope’ above a picture of a ham, and ‘thus we live’ above an image of a turnip. Images of turnips abounded.
25 pfennig ‘turnip’ Notgeld note from Bielefeld, 1917 © Trustees of the British Museum
Collectible
From 1919, towns made a profit by issuing local Notgeld and ‘selling’ it to collectors all over Germany. The exhibition includes two Notgeld albums of collectors from the 1920s. There were thousands of different designs and even minor villages issued their own Notgeld. The myriad designs give an insight into the turbulent political and cultural life of Germany at the time.
25 Pfennig Notgeld note from Bad Oeynhausen, 1921. The note is commenting on the political strife of the early Weimar Republic © Trustees of the British Museum
Local legends
Many notes show references to local history, fairy tales or legends. For example, one note from Cologne refers to the alleged pact with the devil that a master builder struck to build the city’s grand cathedral. The Harz Mountains are home to legends about witches and notes produced in the area bore the legend: ‘There are witches in every place, but ours are the best!’ Or the series from Pritzwalk telling the story of a local outlaw.
Notgeld from the Harz Mountains, 1921. The note alludes to famous legends about witches in the region © Trustees of the British Museum
Local products
Other advertise local trade and tourism. Take the Köstritz Black beer series promoting black beer from, er, Köstritz, emphasising the beer’s healthful properties. There are notes from Bitterfeld promoting the town’s electrical products, and from Thale promoting its ironworks, notes from Wetzlar showing glass lenses and from Wittgensdorf advertising stockings. Some unusual notes were made out of silk or leather, intended to advertise the local textile and leather industries, at Bielefeld and Pössneck, respectively.
A rare leather 50 million Mark Notgeld from Pößneck, originally coloured with fake gilding
Local holidays
Many feature idealised views of German history and culture. There are romantic travel advertisements, appealing to a people longing to shake off the bitter war years such as the notes printed by a small town near Hamburg promoting itself as ‘a hiker’s paradise’ or the notes from Thuringia promoting it as a skiing destination.
Notgeld issued by the Braunschweig public transport authority, 1921. The image shows a coach travelling in the Harz Mountains, watched by the ‘Wild Man’, a mythological figure © Trustees of the British Museum
Nationalism
There are nationalist notes that demand the return of Germany’s colonies, seized under the Treaty of Versailles, or which promote the image of authoritarian Paul von Hindenburg.
50 pfennig Notgeld note showing Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg established himself as a nationalist politician in the post-war period and was elected president in 1925 © Trustees of the British Museum
There are notes castigating war profiteers and then, when the hyper-inflation hit, caricaturing the supposed speculators supposedly responsible for it. Allied to these are the antisemitic notes like the one from Tostedt showing two Jewish speculators hanging from a tree.
Notgeld from Verden, 1921. The note shows how ‘profiteers’ were punished in the middle ages. It was easy for contemporaries to read this as a more or less implicit threat to alleged profiteers of the inflation © Trustees of the British Museum
Politics
There’s a set of notes issued just for the 1921 Social Democratic Party conference in Emden which show portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and August Bebel and which were only valid for the duration of the conference. And bitter images of the reparations Germany was forced to pay for years and years after the end of the war and which were the trigger for the 1923 hyper-inflation crisis when France re-occupied the Ruhr industrial region and the German government began printing money to pay workers for going not strike, a strategy which quickly spiralled out of control.
Notgeld from Bitterfeld, 1921. The note depicts a train transporting coal to France as part of the Treaty of Versailles. There is a small Eiffel tower on the left of the note © Trustees of the British Museum
1923 and the hyper-inflation
During the hyperinflation in 1923 Notgeld played a pivotal role as well. As the Reichsbank could not keep up with printing ever new notes, the government allowed towns and even companies to issue their own emergency money with denominations of millions, billions and even trillions of marks, at the height of the inflation. The note with largest denomination in the exhibition is from Duisburg in western Germany, denominating a whopping 50 trillion mark or 50,000,000,000,000.
Strikingly one of the notes on display was designed at the Bauhaus and shows how in this, as everything else, Bauhaus designers sought clarity and function above all else.
1 million mark note from Thuringia (1923) designed by the Bauhaus © Trustees of the British Museum
The notes on display show the hurried character of these emergency currencies, which were often only printed on one side of the paper. At the end of November 1923 the hyperinflation ended with the introduction of the Rentenmark. A less known fact is that the introduction of the Rentenmark was accompanied by a ban on Notgeld, which had contributed enormously to the currency crisis in the first place.
Conclusion
The closer I looked at each individual notes and read up on its story, the more fascinated I became. What a treasure trove of fascinating stories, local history and fabulously inventive design. There are even labels about designers who became famous, such as Franz Jüttner who was a popular cartoonist before the war and went on to design many Notgeld notes in a distinctive comic book style.
This is a small exhibition in tiny exhibition room 69a (on the first floor at the front of the Museum and easy to miss) but I found it absolutely fascinating.
Related links
- Currency in Crisis: German emergency money, 1914 to 1924 continues at the British Museum until 29 March 2020
- Notgeld: the website for Notgeld collectors
Books & Boots 