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The relationships of Notgeld imagery to Weimar history
(and cultural history) are manifold and complex. In one connection, imagery
on Notgeld illustrated the German perception of what
were then the pressing issues. The imagery on individual pieces and sets
of Notgeld refer directly to the bitterness felt as a
result of the Versailles Treaty and Wilson's 14 points, to the burden of
reparations on German productivity, to the impoverishment of the middle
class as a result post-war inflation, to the carving up of Germany and its
occupation up to the Rhine River. In like manner, many illustrations exist
of regional political situations: the plebicit in Schleswig-Holstein or
the burning of the Volkshaus in Leipzig.
In another connection, Notgeld imagery addresses larger
issues of German identity by touting the common cultural roots of the German
people in military leaders such as "Hermann der Cherusker", "Karl
der Große", and "Friedrich II." and literary figures
such as Martin Luther, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In
like manner and for similar reasons, Notgeld depicts
regional and mythical legends such as those of the witches in the Harz mountains,
the giant Rübezahl, and the prankster Till Eulenspiegel. What Notgeld
imagery does not reflect is the closing of many German cultural institutions
and the selling off of privately held national treasures due to the mounting
privations imposed by the war and the post-war inflation.
This research then turns to explore a single set of Notgeld
issued in Stolzenau and printed in Berlin as a way to exemplify the different
sense of reality it exhibits. Comparing the visual and literary imagery
of Wilhelm Busch on the Stolzenau Notgeld to contemporaneous
images by Georg Grosz, we see two responses representing the perspectives
of a Stolzenauer and a Berliner, a country Burgher and a city dweller, the
comic and the tragic, the public face of a crisis and its private desperation.
The Notgeld image and Grosz's image both convey senses
of the deprivation which the German people had endured since the late years
of the Great War. But whereas artist/intellectual Grosz has become ideological,
Busch's Everyperson has become philosophical. More importantly, this paper
contends, the expressions of despair, the messages of encouragement, the
scenes of middle class life, perspectives on the noble past, observations
about German strengths all had a therapeutic value, a salve for the bruised
German national identity of the post-war period. (See the Grosz/Stolzenau
mini-essay.)
Far from being mere popular ephemera, Notgeld lays
out some significant features of the German nervous system and a mechanism
of German historical developments, exhibiting these with an astounding variety
of imagery and a remarkably high degree of artistic quality.
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