20 Heller Frankenburg

Frankenburg am Hausruck is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities in the immediate postwar period, it issued its own Notgeld when small-denomination coinage simply ceased to circulate. The Habsburg monetary system had collapsed, Austrian state coin production was unable to keep pace with demand, and local governments filled the gap themselves. Jos. Feichtingers Erben was a well-established Linz printing house that produced a considerable volume of Upper Austrian municipal Notgeld during this period — workmanlike output, not prestige commissions.

Frankenburg carries its own grim historical footnote: the 1625 "Würfelspiel" — a forced dice game in which captured Protestant peasants gambled for their lives during the Counter-Reformation. Whether that notoriety influenced the town's design choices here is unrecorded.