20 Heller Schwanenstadt

Schwanenstadt is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar municipalities in the early 1920s, it issued its own emergency small change — Notgeld — to compensate for the near-total disappearance of low-denomination coinage following Austria's economic collapse after the First World War. These hyper-local issues were printed on whatever equipment the town had available, which accounts for the rudimentary production quality common to the series.

Three signatories appear on this note, suggesting the issuing committee required joint authorization — a deliberate safeguard against misuse of what was, technically, an unauthorized parallel currency.