10 Heller Ried im Traunkreis

Ried im Traunkreis is a small Upper Austrian market town, and this 10 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities after the collapse of the Habsburg economy left the country chronically short of small change. Thousands of communes issued their own emergency scrip between roughly 1919 and 1922, and the quality and ambition of these issues varied enormously — from crude rubber-stamped slips to elaborately printed collector pieces.

The Jaksch catalog reference places this firmly in the documented Upper Austrian municipal series. Whether it circulated heavily or was quickly hoarded by the collectors who were already chasing Notgeld systematically by 1920 is the question that determines survival rates for virtually the entire category.