10 Heller Imst

Imst is a market town in the Inn Valley, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities it resorted to locally issued Heller notes during the acute small-change famine of 1919–1920, when the postwar collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left coins effectively absent from everyday commerce. These emergency issues — Notgeld in the broader sense, though Austrian municipal pieces are catalogued separately — were authorized by the town itself rather than any banking authority, which is why the issuer line reads Stadtgemeinde rather than any financial institution.

Deutsche Buchdruckerei in Innsbruck handled a substantial volume of Tyrolean municipal Notgeld, making Imst's series technically competent but not among the more elaborately produced pieces of the type.