10 Heller Mautern

Mautern an der Donau, a small Wachau town on the south bank of the Danube, issued these Heller notes as part of the broader Austrian Notgeld wave that followed the economic dislocation of the First World War. With the old Habsburg currency system collapsing and small coin effectively disappearing from circulation, hundreds of Austrian municipalities printed their own emergency fractions — this is one of them. The Stadtgemeinde had no printing house of any consequence; local production on modest equipment accounts for the rough impression quality common across the Mautern series.