Notgeld (Saxony Porcelain)

Lyrics

[Intro]
You're not paper.
You're cold in my hand.

[Verse 1]
You are the color of bone china.
From the kilns of Meissen, in Saxony.
Nineteen twenty-one.
You say fifty pfennig, but you feel like a story.
A small, round plaque with the town hall drawn on your face.
You were never meant to be folded.
Never meant to be worn thin in a pocket.

[Chorus]
You're the money they made when the money was gone.
A little piece of art against the storm.
A town selling its beauty when the banks were all bare.
Not a promise to pay, but a souvenir.
A whisper of faith made of porcelain and air.

[Verse 2]
I picture your cousins.
A note printed on silk from Krefeld, too fragile to spend.
A briquette of coal from a mine in the Ruhr, stamped with a number, smelling of earth.
A scrap of leather, a sliver of wood.
A whole catalog of desperation, made beautiful.
The Serienscheine, designed for a drawer.
Not for the baker, but for the collector.

[Chorus]
You're the money they made when the money was gone.
A little piece of art against the storm.
A town selling its beauty when the banks were all bare.
Not a promise to pay, but a souvenir.
A whisper of faith made of porcelain and air.

[Bridge]
Did anyone ever buy bread with you?
Or were you always for the album, for the glass case?
A riddle printed on your back, in local dialect.
A date that had already passed the day you were fired in the kiln.
You were born an artifact.
You were born a memory of the crisis you were made in.

[Outro]
Cold in my hand.
Hugo Matthaes, did you know?
You weren't making currency.
You were bottling lightning.
You were making a ghost.