20 Heller Eschenau

Eschenau is a small market commune in the Pielach valley, and like hundreds of similarly sized Austrian municipalities, it issued Notgeld during the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. These local emergency issues were authorized under wartime and postwar administrative necessity, not by the national banking system — Gemeinde Eschenau had no more monetary authority than its stamped paper implied, which was very little.

The JPR0186c series designation places this among the documented Lower Austrian communal issues catalogued by Jaksch. The 20 Heller denomination was the workhorse value of Austrian municipal Notgeld, produced in quantities that make surviving examples common but render fine condition ones harder to locate than the raw numbers suggest.