10 Heller Wachau - St Michael

Austrian Notgeld of this type occupies a peculiar administrative niche: issued not by a bank or national authority but by a local market commune, Spitz an der Donau, filling the severe coin shortage that persisted in Austria well into the early 1920s. The 1920 date places this firmly in the second wave of Notgeld production, when many communities shifted from purely functional emergency scrip to more elaborately designed collector issues — a distinction that matters for understanding surviving populations. These later notes were often printed in larger quantities and retained unspent, which paradoxically makes heavily circulated examples harder to source than pristine ones.

Eduard Sieber of Vienna was a small commercial printer regularly engaged for provincial Notgeld contracts, not one of the prestige houses. Designer Rudolf Weber was local to Spitz itself.