Hi, maybe someone can help me with this, what does the date on German banknotes mean? I refer to the exact dates, with day, month and year that appear printed on the German banknotes. The date of the law that authorized them to circulate? The date they were put into circulation? Thanks for the help!
It appears to be the date that note was issued/authorized. I think @chrisild might be able to better answer
Not really. I could tell how things worked with the Deutsche Mark notes issued by the central bank of our country (Deutsche Bundesbank), but that note is a little older, hehe. At that time, there was no "Germany" except for a loose union called Deutscher Bund which did not have a central bank. So the single countries issued their own notes, or authorized private and semi-private banks to issue them. In the mid-1860 there were almost 60 paper money issuers in the Deutscher Bund, and Lübeck was a country, later a state, of its own until the mid-1930s. (This "Commerz-Bank in Lübeck", by the way, has nothing to do with the later and today's Commerzbank.) To make a potentially long story short: My guess is that the date was used for a certain series and will thus not be a precise issue date. Christian
Thanks for the answer. That banknote was for information purposes, I was referring in particular to notes from 1900 onwards. Thanks again.
In general, those dates are kind of authorization dates. The Deutsche Bundesbank did that with the DEM notes too - they had precise day/month/year dates which referred to when a certain denomination of a certain series was first issued. These days the the ECB simply uses the year, again for the initial emission of a certain type. The Bundesbank, by the way, has a large collection of coins and notes - and in 1963 it published a book about "German Paper Money 1772-1870". Later it was scanned and put online (see here). PDF, about 12 MB, in German but with many images ... Christian
