10 Heller Gumpoldskirchen

Gumpoldskirchen's Heller notgeld belongs to the enormous wave of Austrian municipal emergency currency that flooded the country following the collapse of the Habsburg empire and the severe coin shortages that persisted into the early 1920s. Thousands of Austrian Gemeinden issued their own scrip during this period, redeemable locally and theoretically backed by municipal funds — in practice, many were never presented for redemption at all, absorbed instead by collectors who recognized early that the issues were ephemeral.

The printer, E. Seitenberg of Vienna's third district, handled a number of small municipal commissions of this type. Gumpoldskirchen, a wine-producing village south of Vienna, would have had a modest local economy but sufficient civic infrastructure to coordinate the issue.