20 Heller Gföhl

Gföhl is a small market town in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it issued its own emergency paper money — Notgeld — during the acute coin shortage that followed Austria's defeat in World War One. The 1920 date places this squarely in the second wave of Austrian municipal Notgeld, by which point many towns had shifted from purely functional issues toward more decorative designs intended to attract collectors, a practice that generated modest revenue and is now called "Serienscheine."

The near-square format is characteristic of Gföhl's issue across denominations. Whether this example circulated genuinely or was bought directly by collectors is, as with most late Austrian Notgeld, effectively unknowable.