10 Heller

Fraham is a village in the Eferding district of Upper Austria with a population that has rarely exceeded a few hundred souls. That such a tiny municipality issued its own emergency currency is less surprising than it sounds — Austria in 1920 was awash in Notgeld, as the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left local governments scrambling to fill a coin shortage that the Vienna authorities could not address quickly enough.

Riedlinger's design credit is worth noting: local Notgeld often went to regional commercial artists rather than trained engravers, and the underprint security feature on a village-level issue reflects how seriously even minor municipalities took the formalities of fiduciary paper.