During and after the First World War, money,
especially small change, was in short supply. Paper and metal was being used in
the war efforts and people's natural tendancy to hold onto something of value,
(ie) coins and banknotes, furthered the shortage. Eventually to get over this
problem, the state bank appears to have agreed to allow towns, villages and
municipalities to issue their own money. These issues were 'emergency' issues.
The word 'not' means emergency or necessity and 'geld' means money. If a German banknote has the word Reichbanknote on it,
then it has been issued by the state. This would be rather like an English
banknote having been issued by the Bank of England. If it is a
Reichbanknote then it is not a piece of notgeld (notes issued by towns
and villages etc.etc.) Most notgeld will have the name of a town on it. Some
will say something like this; Gutschein der Stadt.........Gutschein der
Gemeinde......... Gutschein translates as 'voucher'.
As time
went on, more and more towns and villages jumped on the band wagon to print
their own money, so that eventually, individual towns were able to produce notes
that depicted their town's buildings or things that were important to their
identity. If the town produced a commodity, eg) silk (Bielefeld), then the notes
quite often depicted these manufacturing processes. In the above example,
several of the Bielefeld notgeld issues were actually printed on silk and linen.
Local 'heroes' could be depicted as could scenes from round and about. So many
of these notgeld were so colourful, that it was inevitable that collectors would
soon become interested in them. Apart from metal issues, notgeld was usually
made of paper. Occasionally it was issued in the form of card, silk, linen,
jute, chamois leather, leather, aluminium foil, velvet and by using such things
as playing cards (spielkarton). At the beginning of the war, 1914, the notgeld
issues were drab and bland, with many issues having been signed and counter
signed by hand. Some early notes in my collection have 3 hand written signatures
on them. In 1921, when the phenomenom was at it's height, thousands upon
thousands of 'sets' were being produced. In 1923, notgeld became affected by the
runaway inflation that had hit the German economy and so inflationary notgeld
began to emerge. Notgeld was usually only valid in its own town, but notes were
excepted in other places as well, especially at the time of the high inflation.
Sometimes notes travelled through the whole German Reich (empire), more than
600 miles.