Art Weimar Lesson Lite
@weimartifacts
This is "Weimar Lesson (Lite)" a smaller version of the one auctioned on Scarce.city. It has only three bills and a size of A3. We pulled some knowledge from books, added real historical artifacts and we are hoping people will value it on Plebeian.market.The collage may be disassembled and all bills may be pulled out from the frame. We didn’t use glue to fix banknotes.
What are the constituents of this collage? They are all pretty simple and they are all Reichsbanknotes. We see here pretty formal and fairly standard banknotes, official bills of Weimar Republic Reichsbank. They have various issuing dates and denominations of 1, 1000 and 1 000 000 so called “papermarks” with pretty clear message on each of them:
Whosoever copies or falsifies banknotes or acquires and puts copied or falsified banknotes into circulation will be punished with no less than two years of prison time.
About the first note, the "Darlehnskassenschein", we have found translated text from German Wikipedia. They were
loan notes were issued in Germany between 1914 and 1922 by the Reich Debt Administration (Reichsschuldenverwaltung). Formally, these notes were not "real" banknotes, but had to be accepted by all public treasuries as a means of payment. With the start of their issuance at the start of World War I, these loan notes were legally covered by loans on industrial and agricultural goods, but like all other means of payment, they were not redeemable for marks-gold.
Concretely, these values were used to constitute additional cash used during and after the First World War. They circulated alongside “Reichsbank”, “Reichskassenscheine” banknotes, private banknotes, emergency notes and many other currency substitute symbols issued by federal states, municipalities or large companies …
Thus, the 1st item is exceptionally good in telling us the story where the Great Weimar Hyperinflation has begun: unbaked irredeemable money surrogates.
These bills illustrate red line below with area filled with black. Numbers of papermark price against gold mark which were taken from Bresciani-Turroni book become material. 1000 and 1M papermarks bills are in good condition. It is visible that they are used, less weary than poor 1 Mark bill. We know the last owner, he was a berliner who came through two world wars. Unfortunately we do not know his occupancy in Weimar Republic but for sure he had a tough times and one who returned from the front lines into nightmares of economic disaster.
References
From The Economics of Inflation - A Study of Currency Depreciation in Post War Germany, Bresciani-Turroni, Costantino
Extra image in interior. All bills are original.
