This is "Weimar Lesson". We pulled some knowledge from books, added real historical artifacts and we are hoping people will value it on Scarce.city. 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? Let’s start moving along the horizontal axis. The first note is Notgeld or "Emergency Money". Early hyperinflation stage low denomination (0.5 Mark) Notgeld (1920) coupon has lines from satirical song about soldier who went to war and, of course, was killed. This is probably an example of German Black humor. Money of this kind
were normally issued by local businesses and municipalities because paradoxically, there was a shortage of money for keeping economy running (1, 2). Notgeld gave German Weimar Republic hyperinflation such a distinctive feature because they were very different. Look, on the top of the collage there is another Notgeld item. It serves both for balancing composition and for the
argument. Notgeld with the marching solder issued by Lippe-Detmold and notgeld with the old market square of Braunschweig have only common denomination. They are much informal, even satirical.

Next to 50 Pfennings coupons, we see pretty formal and fairly standard banknotes, official bills of Weimar Republic Reichsbank. They have various issuing dates and denominations of 1000, 100 000 000 and 10 000 000 000 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.

These bills illustrate yellow line below. Numbers of papermark price against gold mark which were taken from Bresciani-Turroni book become material. 1000 and 10B papermarks bills are pretty weary, who knows to whom they belonged but this is a fact that every owner tried to get rid of them as soon as possible.

The solder from 50 pf bill marches to the West. Likely this is because the original satirical song was written during European Napoleonic wars. But today it also looks like the soldier marches into the past and the world is facing the same problems as 100 years ago. This is why we will donate 15% of proceeds from this auction to support Ukraineans we know personally and whose livelihood currently being destroyed.

^1 "When Money Dies" by Adam Fergusson
^2 From The Economics of Inflation - A Study of Currency Depreciation in Post War Germany, Bresciani-Turroni, Costantino

Materials: Paper, acryl paint, 3 Reichsbanknote, 2 Notgeld note.

Dimensions: 445 x 540 mm

Weight: approx 1 kg

More details from the Weimar Artifacts website here.

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