I'm a multi-millionaire!

On our way yesterday to an exhibition at the Pergamon Museum about Uruk, the first major metropolis in the world (it's 5000 years old), aviva_m and I stopped off at a flea market where I got fleas this:

( 20,000 Mark 1923 German banknote )

A little bit of German history, mine to keep.^* It cost me €2.

* In case anyone doesn't know the background: in 1923, impatient at German's slow delivery of World War I reparations, French troops occupied the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, and the country's currency went into hyperinflation, until eventually a new chancellor (Stresemann) was appointed, who brought it under control. It was during this period that the Nazis gained their first surge in popularity.

I chose this banknote because it's pretty and I like blackletter, but, by the end of hyperinflation, 20,000 Marks would not have bought you a penny chew; so I also got (for slightly more) a 500,000,000 Mark note, which would not have sufficed to buy me a loaf of bread at the time:

There were also banknotes going for substantially higher values, too, measured in milliards (thousand millions), and also overstamped banknotes, from when the currency was rising so fast it was no longer worthwhile to design and issue new notes, the mint just printed new values over the top of old notes; but these cost considerably more (up to €90). Already by the time the 500M Mark note was issued, it seems they'd given up printing both sides of the paper (though the use of watermarked paper suggests to me what I've got is the real thing and not a fake).

According to Wikipedia, the highest value banknote issued during this period was what the Germans called (as the British still did when I was growing up) 100 billion Mark; nowadays this would be called 100 trillion. I can't bring myself to abuse the number system in this way; since I can't use the old British use any longer, I'll settle for 10¹⁴ Mark instead.

As an aside, did you know that a thousand years ago, the term "mark" could be used to describe English currency? It meant two thirds of a pound.