10 Heller Hadersfeld

Hadersfeld is a village of a few hundred people tucked into the Wienerwald west of Klosterneuburg, and this note is among the more extreme examples of the Notgeld phenomenon taken to its material limits. By 1920, Austrian municipalities had been issuing emergency paper for years, but some communities — particularly those near timber operations — turned to wood veneer as a practical substitute. The Ungarholz sawmill in Klosterneuburg supplied the Sperrholzplatten stock, which gave the issuing authority access to a material that was locally abundant and essentially impossible to replicate by hand.

Wood-veneer Notgeld is inherently fragile across the grain and susceptible to splitting at the edges — condition problems that are structural rather than a sign of heavy use.