bavarikon4U10 Pfennig - Ortsnotmünze der Stadt Frankenthal von 1918
Description
Picture on front: Value numeral 10, writing on outside.
Writing on front: City of Frankenthal - war money 1918
Picture on back: Worker in the ammunition factory, carrying a cannon bullet to the right with both arms. Writing on outside.
Writing on the back: For the Fatherland.
The city of Frankenthal, located in the former Bavarian Rhine Palatinate, issued a comprehensive series of emergency coins to counteract the war-related shortage of state coins between 1917 and 1919. This local emergency coin dates from the last year of the First World War. Both the iron as (emergency) coin metal and the reverse design underline the character of the coin as war emergency money: The back of the coin impressively shows the commitment of the women on the 'home front'. The men fighting in the field had to be replaced by the women at home, not least in the armaments industry around Frankenthal. The ammunition worker designed by the artist C. Grimm merges in this role: the worker drags a heavy cannon bullet through an ammunition depot with all her strength, but still concentrated and carefully, as if she had been doing this her whole life. All resources, including human resources, should be mustered "For the Fatherland," as the inscription on the coin proclaims – but ultimately in vain: the German Reich was defeated in Compiègne on 11 November 1918. As the continuation of the emergency series from the city of Frankenthal in the crisis-ridden post-war year of 1919 shows, the end of the war by no means automatically led to an end to the rampant shortage of coins.