10 Heller Rainberg

Rainberg is a small locality in Upper Austria, and this note belongs to the vast wave of Austrian Gemeinde-issued Notgeld that flooded the country between 1919 and 1921 as postwar coin shortages made even the smallest copper and nickel denominations effectively unavailable. Municipalities printed their own fractional notes not as a speculative act but out of practical necessity — ordinary transactions at the village level had become nearly impossible without them.

The two signatories, Emsenhuber and Scheichelbauer, were almost certainly local officials rather than banking functionaries. Municipal Notgeld of this denomination was typically authorized by a council vote and signed by whatever officers the commune could muster.