The collections of the German Historical Museum

Coins, medals, and bills are important historial witnesses, which make them valuable items in the collections of museums. With their respective foundations in 1952 and 1987, both the Museum for German History (MfDG) and the German Historical Museum (DHM) started to build up a collection of numismatics. For 22 years, the numismatic collection exist as an independent collection within the MfDG. After the closing of the East German museum the DHM took over its holdings completely. Today the collection contains approximately 7,000 coins, emergency money, tokens, and jetons, 5,000 medals and commemorative coins, as well as 60,000 bills.

Medals, Emergency coins, Tokens, and Jetons

This section of the numismatic collection documents the most important stages of the monetary history of Germany from the first Roman minting of coins in the Rhineland to the current monetary system of the Federal Republic of Germany. Numerous single objects illustrate the different monetary forms from the Middle Ages to our modern times. The spectrum reaches from medieval minting of "Pfennige", denars, and bracteates, to the minting of talers from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The money of the merchants from various German regions and epochs illustrates the German monetary confusion, which lasted until the Reichsmünzgesetz (State Monetary Act) of 1871-1876.

Among the many coins of the collection are numerous special kinds: emergency and siege coins from the 16th through the 19th centuries, war money from World War I POW-camps, as well as emergency money from the inflation era 1922/23. The coin-hoard of Kornöd, found in Lower Bavaria, tells of the fate of a peasant, who, during the Thirty Years War, failed to retrieve the money he had buried in order to hide it from looting soldiers. The collection also holds more than 700 so-called "Rechenpfennige", including a chronogically complete selection of "Historienpfennige", which illustrates the armed conflicts in the Habsburg Netherlands between 1568 and 1648 almost like a "histoire métallique". To be found in the section of East German coins is also the unique goldcopy of the 20-Mark piece with the portrait of Karl Marx, given to the former East German head of state, Walter Ulbricht, on his 75th birthday in 1968.

Medals and Commemorative coins

Medals and Commemorative coins constitutes the center of the collection of numismatics. The time frame extends from the Renaissance with its portrait medals of rulers and wealthy citizens to the so-called peoples' medals that portray historically peculiar events almost like today's souvenir industry. Famous medal engravers like Dadler, Müller, Höhn, Vestner, David d'Angers, Posch, Pfeuffer, and Kullrich are equally subject to the critical eye of history as are the works of less well-known artists. Judged by the importance of the given event, even less artistic products may have had an aggressive and explosive effect on the contemporary society. Since almost every cultural event -- the cycle of life, war and peace, honor and shame, plight and happiness -- became a theme on a medal, they are important witnesses of past epochs.

The German Historical Museum also holds a large number of medals on the history of the Labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the collection of the brewer from Krefeld, Georg Staudigel, which was shown in an exhibition at the University of Bochum in 1979. The spectrum of more than 2,000 existing East-German medals from 1948 to 1990 encompasses art medals as well as inflation mass products that were distributed on various occasions by political parties, military and paramilitary organisations, as well as townships and communities.

Bills

The collection of paper money represents the quantitatively largest section in the collection of numismatics. There are thousands of bills alone for the time of the German Reich and the Weimar Republic. Additionally, there exists a large inventory of inflation emissions of the individual German states, towns and communities, as well as emissions from numerous private companies. Special sub-sections are: bills from World War I POW-camps, the "Prämienscheine" of Nazi concentration camps, East German imprisonment bills, and money from Agricultural Production Co-operatives (LPGs). In addition to this, the collection includes examples that were used for advertisement and propaganda purposes, especially during the Weimar Republic, and series of "Knochengeld" (bone money -- one "bone" as the name for the monetary unit), distributed and used in 1993 as a substitute currency by 55 artists from the "Prenzlauer Berg" neighborhood of Berlin.

Have a look at the archive.