5 Pfennig (Pattern)

Germany had just come out the other side of the worst inflation in its history. In late 1923 the paper mark had collapsed to nothing; the emergency Rentenmark stopped the fall, and on 30 August 1924 a new currency law made the Reichsmark the country's legal tender, divided into a hundred Reichspfennig. A whole set of small coins had to be designed, approved and struck in a hurry, for six mints spread across the country.

The design chosen for the five was the work of the sculptor Waldemar Raemisch: six ears of grain leaning together into a taut, angular pattern on one side, the value in a square framed by four oak leaves on the other. It went into production in 1924 in aluminium bronze — a warm, brassy copper-aluminium alloy — as Jaeger 316, and it stayed in production, on and off, until 1936. Hundreds of millions were made.

So a pattern — a trial piece struck to test a design, a metal or a machine, never meant for your pocket — dated 1925 is a small puzzle. This one carries the mint mark E, for Muldenhütten, the old Saxon state mint near Freiberg. It is struck in copper-nickel, not the adopted aluminium bronze. Its obverse (the heads side) shows an eagle's head facing left with DEUTSCHES REICH, not Raemisch's grain. And its reverse reads simply 5 PFENNIG — not Reichspfennig, the legally correct word since the previous August.

Why it was made, the record does not say. The honest reading is that the new coinage was still being argued over after it launched: the metal, the wording and the imagery were all live questions, and mints and medallists kept proposing. We would rather tell you that plainly than invent a committee meeting.

Two Saxon names are attached to this piece, and together they explain a lot about how it came to exist. The obverse is credited to Friedrich Wilhelm Hörnlein (1873–1945), coin engraver at the Muldenhütten mint from 1911 and one of the last German medallists who cut his designs straight into the steel die by hand — a skill he had learned engraving hunting guns. The reverse is credited to Emil Paul Börner (1888–1970), the Meissen sculptor and painter best known for the porcelain emergency money of 1920–21, which Hörnlein had helped bring into production. These two had worked together for years, a few miles apart. A trial coin from Muldenhütten in 1925 bearing both their names is exactly what that partnership would produce.

Physically it is a small, dense thing: 2.52 g, 18.04 mm across, with a reeded edge — the fine vertical grooves milled into the rim. That is almost exactly the size of the circulating five, but copper-nickel is heavier than aluminium bronze, so it sits a fraction weightier in the hand. Side by side with a common 1925 five-pfennig piece, the difference in colour is immediate: silvery-grey against brassy gold.

The appeal, for a collector, is the contrast itself. The adopted coin is one of the most ordinary objects in German numismatics. This one is the version of it that lost.

Patterns are where you see a state thinking out loud. Circulating coins show you the decision; patterns show you the alternatives that were on the table when the decision was made. For Weimar Germany — a republic rebuilding its money from ruins in 1924 — that is not a small thing to hold.

There is also the naming detail, which is genuinely diagnostic. 5 PFENNIG rather than 5 REICHSPFENNIG dates this piece to a moment when the vocabulary of the new currency was not yet settled in every workshop, or when the proposal deliberately reached back to the older, plainer word. Either way, the legend is the reason a specialist can place the coin at a glance.

Then there is scarcity, which for patterns is usually severe and usually undocumented. Trial strikes were made in handfuls, most were destroyed, and the survivors reach the market through German specialist auctions rather than general dealers. Numista rates this type among the rarest things its members hold. That is a proxy for scarcity, not a mintage figure, and we will not dress it up as one.

We do not publish values. Prices for pattern coins move with the auction record and with condition, and condition on a trial piece is a specialist judgement — assess it from a certified, encapsulated example (a coin professionally graded and sealed in a holder) with the pattern attribution stated on the label, not from a photograph.

A last word on the reference: the number to know is the Schaaf catalogue, the standard work for German trial and pattern strikes since 1871. Schaaf numbers follow the Jaeger number of the related circulating coin, which is why this piece is 316 G1 — 316 being the adopted five-Reichspfennig. It will rarely carry a KM number of its own.