Relics Of An Infamous Currency Collapse

A different type of collapse, but a failure (fractional reserve gold standard) nonetheless...

I'd guess these are bundles of the small 1 mark notes (1000 each), still in their bank wrapping.

But what is the boy holding in his hand? A US note perhaps (to compare the value)?

Yes. It is a Series 1917 $1 United States note.






No. The 1917 $1 United States Note was still commonly used until 1928, though the look was "modernized" in 1923.

Interesting that the Hungarian episode of hyperinflation was mentioned.

I stumbled across this table the other day:

I presume you're referring to what's on the "2". I suspect that it's some sort of colloquialism and/or slang, perhaps muddied further by being presented phonetically to mimic some sort of dialect and/or accent. An example in American English would be if we saw "Aw, shaddup!" we'd recognize that as a regional phonetic rendering of "Oh, shut up!" which itself is slang for "Oh, be quiet!" So deciphering this will likely require somebody who's a native speaker of German. Proceeding on that basis, I'd interpret the reverse inscription as "What does that cost?" with "Bat" being substitued for "Wat" probably as a humorous reference to some alternate pronounciation typical of the locality. I'd be willing to bet that the obverse inscription is also meant to be funny in both content and the manner in which it's expressed. "Geld" obviosly is "money" and I think "nix" actually is a stand-in for "nichts" meaning "nothing" but beyond that I'm stumped.

By the way, my research indicates that's a pretty rare piece of notgeld.

I happened to run across these today, which clearly circulated before the 2008 debacle. Funny that I've never seen other examples in the "junk bin" before.

Here are a few German stamps that show the results of the currency collapse. The two on the right are overprinted. The top one started as a 500 mark stamp and was overprinted as 250 thousand mark. The one on the bottom started as 400 mark and was remade as 100 thousand mark. The other two are 100 million mark and 500 million mark stamps.