Stadt Darmstadt Notgeld
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Aug 25th, 2019. Artwork published in
August 1923
.
Two typefaces designed by Rudolf Koch, paired for Notgeld banknotes issued by the City of Darmstadt in August 1923, during the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic.
Most of the text is set in three sizes of Deutsche Schrift fett (1910). The city’s name features Deutsche Zierschrift, a related decorated style with diagonal hatching, first cast in 1921. The numerals and roman capitals used for the numerical value are probably lettered.
Darmstadt lies about 30 km south of Offenbach, where Koch worked for the Klingspor type foundry since 1906.
4 Comments on “Stadt Darmstadt Notgeld”
See also the Notgeld coupons by Bayerische Bauindustrie A.-G. in Munich.
Not only is Darmstadt just 30 km to the south of Offenbach, but – from late 1918 until 1945 – Offenbach and Darmstadt were both part of the People’s State of Hesse, while Frankfurt am Main was not (it was part of Prussia, at least administratively). The capital of this state was Darmstadt, and while Darmstadt must have had plenty of printing companies in 1923, it is not inconceivable (without seeing the notes to look for printer’s marks, etc.) that these could have been printed in Offenbach.
The Nº 121439 text is probably a nameless kind of type, from some sort of automatic numbering machine
Exactly! It’s not type in the narrow sense of the word, but of course such numbering machines (known as Numerierwerk in German) use prefabricated glyphs. This technique of printing serialized numbers is also referred to as crash numbering. PSY/OPS has two free Crash Numbering fonts (but they’re not really close to the numerals used here).