20 Heller Ortskommune

Pettenbach is a small market commune in the Kirchdorf district of Upper Austria, and this 20 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept rural Austria between 1919 and 1921. With the postwar collapse of the Habsburg monetary system leaving small coin effectively absent from everyday trade, hundreds of municipalities — many far smaller than Pettenbach — were authorized to issue their own emergency fractional currency. The Verborgen-Drucker print house in Vienna handled a significant share of this provincial work, supplying standardized but locally personalized sheets to communes that lacked any printing infrastructure of their own.

Franz Röck's signature as signatory places administrative accountability squarely at the municipal level, as was required under the Austrian Notgeld regulations of the period.