20 Kronen

This note is the Austrian half of a fractured empire. Following the armistice and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the successor states scrambled to separate their currency from the common pool. The Oesterreichisch-ungarische Bank continued issuing notes into 1919 not as a going concern but essentially as a caretaker institution — the bank itself was formally liquidated in 1920, and this note predates that closure by months.

Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania each overprinted or stamped their allocated notes to claim them as national currency. Unoverprinted examples like this circulated in rump Austria, where hyperinflation was already accelerating toward the catastrophic levels that would follow in 1921–22.