Reinhard Kullrich

He was born in Berlin on 23 February 1869 and christened Adolf Moritz Wilhelm Reinhard Kullrich — a mouthful he sensibly shortened. The last name was already known in the trade. His father, Friedrich Wilhelm Kullrich (1821–1887), had trained as a metalworker, studied at Berlin's Academy of Art, worked at the Loos medal house and with the Wyons in London, and ended up cutting dies at the Royal Mint in Berlin — not only for Prussia and the German Empire but for Norway, Romania and Brazil. A die is the hardened steel punch that stamps a design into a blank disc of metal; whoever cuts it decides how the finished coin actually looks in the hand, however grand the name on the design credit.

Reinhard went into the same trade, but he came up the long way. He worked for the Loos medal mint — the same Berlin house his father had passed through — and then for the medallist Otto Schultz. When Schultz died in 1911, Kullrich was appointed mint medallist at Berlin. He was 42. His father had been dead 24 years.

The timing is the whole story of his career. He arrived at the bench in the last years of imperial Germany, cut dies for its most confident commemoratives, and then watched the state that commissioned them disappear. The Kaiser abdicated in 1918. The mark collapsed in 1923. A new republic needed new money, fast and cheap, and Kullrich was the man already sitting at the Berlin mint when the orders came in.

Kullrich is best understood as a maker rather than an author. On most of the coins that carry his name, someone else drew the idea and Kullrich made it work in steel.

That partnership pattern runs through everything. On the Weimar 50 Pfennig of 1919–1922 he worked with Louis Oppenheim, a Berlin graphic designer and type designer — not a mint man at all. On the aluminium 3 Mark of 1922 and the 1 Mark of 1924 he worked with the sculptor Josef Wackerle. On the Danzig 2 Gulden of 1923 he worked with a Professor Dr. Fischer. On the 1927 Nordhausen commemorative, the motif came from the Munich medallist Maximilian Dasio and the dies came from Kullrich.

That was a deliberate Weimar habit. The republic wanted its coins drawn by artists from outside the mint — poster designers, porcelain sculptors, academy professors — precisely so the money would not look like the Kaiser's money. But an artist's drawing is not a coin. Someone had to translate a flat design into a relief shallow enough to stack, deep enough to read, and tough enough to survive a hundred million strikes. That translation was Kullrich's craft, and it is invisible by design.

Where he worked alone, the results are the plainest coins Germany has ever made: the 1 and 2 Rentenpfennig of 1923, struck for the emergency currency that ended hyperinflation, and the 1 Reichspfennig he carried from 1924 to 1936. And the odd little 4 Reichspfennig of 1932 — the "Brüningtaler," a coin invented by emergency decree to make a wage cut look like a price cut. Kullrich adapted the existing Weimar eagle rather than inventing a new one. That was the job.

Beneath the coinage sits a large medal output in the family tradition. The one with a name attached is the prize plaque for the German Olympic trial competitions, made with the sculptor Paul Sturm around 1914–15 — a bust of Wilhelm II for games that war then cancelled. The Münzkabinett in Berlin holds an example.

Two things are worth saying plainly, because our own catalogue leans on them.

The 1913 Prussian commemoratives for the centenary of the Wars of Liberation — the 2 and 3 Mark pieces — are credited to Kullrich by the MGM numismatic lexicon. That is a single source, and we have not matched it against a mint record or a printed Jaeger. Treat it as likely rather than settled.

The 1926 Lübeck 3 Reichsmark is credited by German dealer catalogues to Karl-Tobias Schwab and Kullrich together. Several listings say so; the specialist catalogue page we checked carries no artist attribution at all. It is consistent with everything else we know about how Weimar commemoratives were made — outside designer, mint die-cutter — but it is dealer-catalogue evidence, not a record.

The pattern is the difficulty with die-cutters generally. Catalogues name the artist who drew a coin far more reliably than the man who cut it. Kullrich's name survives on the coins where a compiler happened to note it, which is not the same as the list of coins he actually made.