20 Heller Hallstatt

Hallstatt's 20 Heller notgeld belongs to the wave of Austrian municipal emergency currency issued after the First World War, when the chronic coin shortage left market towns effectively unable to make change. The Marktgemeinde issued these notes on its own authority — a right extended to municipalities under postwar Austrian financial necessity rather than any formal banking charter.

Hallstatt itself is one of the smallest communities ever to have issued notgeld, a village of a few hundred inhabitants clinging to a lakeside cliff in the Salzkammergut. That a settlement this size ran its own paper currency, however briefly, says something concrete about the depth of the 1919–1921 small-coin crisis.