20 Heller Weilbach

Weilbach is a small market town in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of Austrian municipalities in 1920, it issued its own emergency small change — Notgeld — to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of coin circulation after the war. The Austro-Hungarian monetary system had disintegrated, and the new Republic of Austria could not produce subsidiary coinage fast enough to meet everyday transactional needs. Local authorities stepped in.

The two signatories, A. Schachinger and Franz Hörl, would have been municipal officials authorizing the issue under their own administrative responsibility — a reminder that this is essentially a promissory obligation of a small town government, not a banking institution.