20 Heller Schalchen

Austrian municipal notgeld of this type emerged from a genuine coin shortage that persisted well after the First World War ended — the Austro-Hungarian monetary system had collapsed, and small denominations simply weren't reaching rural communities. Schalchen, a small municipality in Upper Austria, issued its own emergency paper to fill that gap, as hundreds of similarly small parishes did between 1919 and 1921.

The Schmidinger mayoral signature dates this to a specific, brief administrative moment. These hyper-local issues were typically redeemable only within the issuing parish, which kept survival rates low — few outsiders had reason to hold them.