1000 Schilling

The Oesterreichische Nationalbank printed this note in-house — unusual for a high-value issue of the period, when most European central banks still contracted out to specialist security printers. Fritz Zerritsch der Jüngere was a Viennese sculptor and applied artist whose work ran through the Wiener Werkstätte orbit, and his involvement gave the note a distinctly Austrian Modernist character that separates it visually from contemporaneous issues elsewhere in Central Europe.

The timing matters. Austria in 1930 was structurally fragile — the Creditanstalt collapse was barely a year away. This denomination, the highest in the series, circulated through an economy already deep in deflationary stress before the banking crisis made it worse.