10 Heller

Aigen im Mühlkreis was one of hundreds of Austrian municipalities that issued small-denomination cardboard Notgeld in the early 1920s when coin shortages made everyday transactions nearly impossible. The post-WWI collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left local governments to fill the gap themselves, and the result was a chaotic patchwork of hyper-local emergency scrip — some professionally printed, others barely distinguishable from craft projects. This note falls squarely in that municipal self-help tradition.

The perforation as the sole security feature reflects the limited means available to a small Upper Austrian Marktgemeinde. Fr. Pfleger's signature would have been applied as a validation of local authority rather than any banking function.