20 Heller Aigen

One of thousands of Austrian municipal emergency notes — Notgeld — printed during and after World War I when small-denomination coinage disappeared almost entirely from circulation, hoarded by a public with no faith in paper alternatives. Aigen, a small Salzburg municipality, commissioned E.W. Müller locally rather than turning to one of the larger Vienna printing houses, which was common among smaller communes with limited procurement reach.

Three signatories was the norm for notes requiring community accountability. The Jaksch/Pick reference places this firmly in the documented Austrian Notgeld corpus, though survivorship varies considerably across municipal issues.