Notgeld: Text: Research Abstracts

Image Version

ABSTRACT TITLE: German Notgeld (1919-23): Exploring the Past to Reframe the Present

RESEARCHERS: Charles R. Jansen, Ph.D. & Sonja M. Hedgepeth, Ph.D.

Middle Tennessee State University

Murfreesboro, TN 37132

This research examines the circumstances and the mentality of the German people in the crucial transitional period immediately following World War I using German Notgeld, particularly the locally issued Kleingeldscheine, as a research tool to explore the social construction of reality during the first phase of the Weimar Republic (November 1919 to November 1923).

Originally issued to replace coinage under the exigencies of war, German Notgeld ("emergency money") became a flood of authorized, unauthorized but tolerated, and illegal bills printed during the post-war period of hyperinflation that offered a vehicle for advertising, propaganda, and regional commentary. Monuments of local pride and politics, German folk-tales and their folk heroes, even jokes in regional dialects depicted on Notgeld all express a commentary not only on the rapidly shifting political life and rapidly deteriorating economic health of the Weimar Republic, but also on the psychic state of common German people. Appealing deeply to a German Romanticism that touted the virtues of hearth and homeland, Notgeld was instrumental in constructing a reality that insulated German citizens from the remarkable violence of the times while at the same time suggesting ways of coping with the disintegrating social fabric. Further, we believe that themes of Blut und Boden, nostalgia for the glorious past, and chauvinisms of all kinds seen in Notgeld imagery provided strong reins that enabled a National Socialism to tug at the hearts and minds of common Germans.

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 miniessay)

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.