20 Heller Lichtenberg

Austrian Notgeld from the hyperinflationary scramble of 1920, when hundreds of small municipalities printed their own emergency small-change notes to compensate for the disappearance of metal coinage after the war. Lichtenberg bei Linz — a small Upper Austrian commune — was among the smaller issuers, and its series is not widely documented in the major Notgeld catalogues, which makes provenance records for individual pieces harder to pin down.

Hugo Gielge's involvement is the one detail worth holding onto. Local artist commissions for Notgeld were common, but the quality varied enormously — some villages got competent regional graphic work, others got nearly nothing.