30 Heller St. Florian

St. Florian is a market town in Upper Austria, and this 30 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities between 1919 and 1921. With the postwar collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monetary system, local authorities — down to the smallest Marktcommune — were authorized to issue their own emergency small-denomination paper to compensate for the chronic shortage of coins. By 1920 the phenomenon had become almost competitive, with towns commissioning increasingly elaborate designs to attract collector interest, a secondary market that effectively subsidized the printing costs.

The Marktcommune St. Florian is best known as the site of the Augustinian monastery where Anton Bruckner spent much of his life and is buried — a fact the town's administrators were unlikely to ignore when commissioning local Notgeld imagery.