20 Heller Dross

Dross is a small wine-growing village in the Krems district of Lower Austria, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities after the First World War, it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — to compensate for the near-total disappearance of metal coinage. The Heller denominations were the smallest and most practically necessary, used for everyday transactions at a time when the collapsing Habsburg economy had made even low-value coins vanish from circulation.

Printed in Switzerland despite the note's purely local purpose — an arrangement common among Austrian Gemeinden that lacked access to domestic printing capacity — this piece carries a designer credit to Rohrhoper, about whom little has been documented in the Notgeld literature.