20 Heller Ernsthofen

Ernsthofen is a small Lower Austrian municipality that, like hundreds of others, issued its own emergency scrip during the Notgeld period following the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system. The Gemeinde turned to Paul Gerin in Vienna — a printer responsible for a substantial share of Austrian municipal Notgeld — with artwork credited to A. Peschke, an arrangement typical of Gerin's operation, where in-house or contracted designers supplied localized motifs to differentiate otherwise standardized small-denomination issues.

Two signatories authenticated this note: the Bürgermeister and his deputy, the Vizebürgermeister Stefan Gerstmayr. That dual-signature requirement on a 20 Heller note says something about how seriously even tiny municipalities treated the legal formality of issuing what was, in practice, hyperlocal currency.