10 Heller

Pühret is a small village in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized communities, it printed its own emergency small change notes — Notgeld — during the postwar currency chaos that followed the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian state simply could not produce enough low-denomination coinage to meet everyday demand, so municipalities issued their own, formally or otherwise.

The two signatories, Plözeneder and Gastinger, were almost certainly local officials rather than bankers. That both signatures appear by hand rather than by facsimile print is typical of the smaller village issues, where production runs were too modest to justify engraved signature plates.