Tag Archive: 0money

During the lockdown, I started work on some larger cataloguing projects.  One of them is an extraordinary collection of German Notgeld, the ‘emergency money’ which originated, out of necessity, during the First World War, but which later became a way for towns to try and make some money in the early Twenties (before hyperinflation took hold) […]

By 1919, all low-value coins in Germany had vanished, due to a shortage of metal, a shortage which gave rise to a printed phenomenon known as Notgeld, or ‘emergency money’.  Neil MacGregor explains: ‘as there was no longer an effective national currency for the lower denominations, every town and city had to make its own.  […]