20 Heller Imst

Imst is a market town in the Tyrolean Inn valley, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities, it issued its own emergency small change — Notgeld — during the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. The Deutsche Buchdruckerei G.m.b.H. in Innsbruck handled a large volume of these local issues, functioning essentially as a regional clearinghouse for Tyrolean municipal printing needs.

The Heller denominations from Imst are among the more obscure entries in the Tyrolean Notgeld corpus. Survival rates for low-denomination paper Heller notes are generally poor — they circulated hard and were redeemed or discarded once the shortage eased after 1920.