|
Page 1 of 3 Serienscheine
Many notgeld (emergency money) pieces come from easily recognised 'sets'. The 6 notes below, form a complete set, issued in Luebeck by 'Bund der Hotel - Restaurant - and Cafe-Angelstellten Deutschlands'.
These sets can be made up of many different combinations. More usual are sets consisting of a basic set of 3 notes with different values, eg) 25pf, 50pf & 75pf or containing 6 notes of the same value eg) 50pf, but with each note having a different design.
(hold mouse over image and see the reverse)
Series or sets can contain from 1 piece up to a massive 150, as in the case of the Berlin 'Tagliche Rundschau' pieces cataloguing as Lm.88!! Usually the front of such notes is similar and the backs may depict different scenes, buildings, people etc.etc. These sets or series are usually very colourful and are almost all in uncirculated condition. The scan below depicts the famous fable of the pied piper from Hamlyn (Hameln)
The serienscheine issues of notgeld, in a lot of cases, tried to make light of the desperate times faced by the people immediately after WWI. The stories that they told and portrayed quite often made light of a very desperate situation. Food was in short supply and money was very tight for most people. The scan below tells one such story.
(hold mouse over image and see the obverse (front) of the note).
The translation reads: '"Oh! Pure enjoyment cannot be had, by those who must pay and do not have!"
Serienscheine pieces were primarily issued to meet a demand in the collector market that had grown from the initial issues, 6 to 7 years earlier. The 2 main catalogues available to collectors of notes in this field are by Kai LINDMAN and the other by Manfred MEHL. Several series were issued in presentation envelopes, which in time, collectors will probably come across. (Dr. Arnold Keller, the famous notgeld collector and writer of notgeld catalogues, was reported to have said that these were a 'complete nonsense'.)
Today, they give the notgeld collector yet another dimension to collecting. Add to that, the different account numbers (konto number) and their variants, overprints, colour variations and details such as the name of the printer either appearing or not appearing on the notes, then the collector really does need to decide at an early stage what he is actually going to collect. Many collectors go for the main sets and just keep any variants as and when they see them. I always think it is nice to have a mixture of notes in your collection though.
There are 2 series from Brande-Hornerkirchen (Lm.144). The ones depicted above, with the hatching, catalogue as Lm.144a and are scarce!! This is sometimes typical of serienscheine notgeld. You tend to get a more usual or 'basic'set and then a scarcer variant set. The more usual set has solid colours rather than the hatching.
The following picture shows a beautiful set of 6 serienscheine notgeld from Iserlohn, which catalogue as Lm.629. As the issuing authorities started to make their notgeld more colourful, graphical and beautiful, they knew more of them would be kept by the collectors. Fewer notgeld redeemed meant more straight profit for their coffers! Some local authorities that could afford it, hired famous artists to design their notgeld. The collector market that had sprung up almost overnight were delighted with these types of issues and snapped up the newly issued series as fast as they appeared.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>
|
