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20 Heller Ottensheim

Issuer Marktgemeinde Ottensheim (Market Town of Ottensheim)
Year 1920
Type Local banknote
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Reverse description The reverse is printed in violet-brown and carries a large panoramic vignette of the market town of Ottensheim, rendered in a fine linear illustration style signed 'I. E. Kleinert' in the upper right corner, showing the town's rooftops, church steeple, castle, surrounding fields, and the Danube valley in the background. The denomination '20 HELLER' is set in bold type across the lower portion of the vignette. A small heraldic shield of Ottensheim appears at the lower right within the central image, and the whole composition is enclosed by a dashed decorative border.
Reverse lettering 20 HELLER
I. E. Kleinert
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Comments

Ottensheim is a small market town on the Danube in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities it resorted to printing its own Notgeld in the early 1920s when coin shortages made small-denomination transactions nearly impossible. The Austrian federal government had effectively abandoned the low-denomination coinage supply, leaving towns to solve the problem themselves — which they did, sometimes with more artistic ambition than their size would suggest.

Kleinert's involvement is worth noting: the designer produced work for several Upper Austrian municipal issues during this period, giving some of these otherwise parochial pieces a more considered graphic character than the purely functional stampings issued elsewhere.

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