In Case of Emergency, Print Money
February 19, 2019 8:26 AM   Subscribe

In 1914, as Germany entered into World War I, the Imperial government suspended the gold standard. As a result, the values of paper and hard currencies diverged, hoarding started, and towns, employers, and banks started to print their own emergency notes [Colin Dickey, Topic]. This notgeld or emergency money, continued into their Weimar Era, and varied, from plain to ornate, from single-color to colorful, from few pfennigs to fifty million marks or more, and reflected [flicker album, previously] the people and the times: the towns and their history, commentary on politics and hunger, and meta-commentary on the notgeld themselves. Some of the images of the notes are anti-semitic.

Welcome to notgeld.com and the interesting world of notgeld collecting

ConfRpt: Alternative Realities. Utopian Thought in Times of Political Rupture (April 2018) - "Erin Sullivan Maynes [dissertation: Speculating on Paper: Print Culture and the German Inflation, 1918-1924] (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) brought to light emergency currencies (Notgeld) issued during Germany’s inflationary crisis after World War I, which reasserted the local landscape and notions of craft and tradition at a time of dizzying transformation and uncertainty. "

see also:
Confidence and Gold: German War Finance 1914-1918, Stephen Gross, Central European History, Vol. 42, No. 2 (JUNE 2009), pp. 223-252
posted by the man of twists and turns (8 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 


Cool! I don't think there are anti semitic pictures in your images link, that's Hermann Allmers
posted by haemanu at 3:02 PM on February 19, 2019


These are very cool! Love the woodcut versions!

A couple of years ago, I set out to design a kind of Notgeld for use by our neighborhood, as a kind of local currency for the “zombie apocalypse”. The theory being that the last thing you would want is for some visitor from outside of the community to bring sacks of moribund or defunct US banknotes they’d acquired from who knows where, exchange them for food and medicine and other items of value in your community, and then be on their way, leaving the community with fat stacks of valueless cash, and a neighborhood depleted of valuable goods needed to survive.

I considered and researched different kinds of scrip, war bonds, promissory notes, tokens, coupons, vouchers, warrants, substitute banknotes from other countries, silver coins, historic US banknotes, small bags of salt, and personal checks. They all have weaknesses: some are easier to counterfeit, some introduce their own scarcities, some are “too” transferable (and thus are, like cash, susceptible to robbery and theft).

I finally landed on a solution: my design was a communal note of credit, drawn on the full faith and credit of a committee of five signatory members of the community of high esteem, serially numbered, printed on high-security check paper with hologram, emblazoned with guilloche printing, and finally stamped with a seal held by only one of the five signatories.

It was only after I’d printed, stamped and signed the first set of prototypes that it really hit me: basically I’d just made a ten dollar bill, the transfer of which had to be registered. Which, of course, defeats the whole point of having cash. So I got rid of the registration idea. At which it just became a personal check. :-P

Then I looked at the stack of personal checks I had in my desk drawer and realized I could just use those, make them out to “Bearer” for $10 each and sign them, and I could have avoided all the trouble. Of course, then I wouldn’t have learned all about war scrip and guilloche printing and all that other cool stuff!
posted by darkstar at 4:28 PM on February 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


The Italians had miniassegni in the late 1970s when there was a shortage of small change (50 to 100 lire). I have a vague recollection of stamps sealed in clear plastic, but google fails my efforts to substantiate this.
posted by BWA at 6:39 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


My favourite historical system for dealing with a shortage of currency is the split tally. The British House of Parliament burned down in 1834 because they decided to burn centuries worth of tally sticks in the Parliament furnaces.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:31 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


When my Opa died, we had to launder found a sack of both Weimar bills and Notgeld - - had to literally launder it to get it back home as it stank, and a warm cycle in the dryer did wonders for the mildew.

Ended up framing some of them and in my dining room you can go from the 500 Mark note up to the 1 Trillion mark (which is the 1000 mark, with "One Trillion" stamped across it, as it was cheaper to produce...).
posted by Seeba at 12:12 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Apparently, when you could trade DM for Euros, Opa tried trading in one of those and was told by the bank teller "Do you think you're even the fifth person to try this today? Go away."
posted by Seeba at 12:14 PM on February 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Huh. I have a bunch of these. I bought them off the street in Berlin when I was backpacking in the early 90's. I just thought the artwork looked cool. Time to dig them out again.
posted by vignettist at 7:59 PM on February 20, 2019


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