25 Heller Schwarzenthal

Schwarzenthal is a small village in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similarly obscure municipalities, it issued Notgeld during the acute small-change shortage that followed Austria's postwar economic collapse. These hyper-local issues were authorized under emergency provisions and typically printed in tiny quantities — often a few hundred to a few thousand pieces — by whatever local printer was available. Franz Zeilinger's signature here almost certainly represents a municipal official rather than a banker.

The extreme localization of Austrian Notgeld from this period makes provenance everything. Village-level issues frequently survived only in collector sets assembled at the time of issue.