10 Heller Losenstein

Losenstein is a small market town on the Enns River in Upper Austria, and this Heller note is among the hundreds of municipal emergency issues that flooded the Austrian countryside between 1919 and 1921. The collapse of the Habsburg monetary system after 1918 left small communities starved of small change — coins had been hoarded, melted, or simply stopped circulating — forcing individual Gemeinden to print their own fractional scrip as a stopgap.

Jos. Schörkhuber's signature almost certainly identifies the sitting Bürgermeister or a senior municipal official rather than a printer. The Jaksch-Pick reference places this squarely in the Notgeld category, locally redeemable and theoretically temporary.