40 Heller Admont

Admont is best known as the home of one of the most celebrated monastic libraries in the world, but this note comes from the civil administration, not the abbey. It belongs to the vast wave of Austrian municipal Notgeld issued after the First World War, when the collapse of the Habsburg economy and a severe shortage of small-denomination coin forced thousands of local authorities to print their own emergency fractional currency. Emil Priebel in Steyr was a regional commercial printer, not a specialist banknote firm, which is exactly the kind of operation these cash-strapped municipalities could afford.

Three signatories authenticated each note — the mayor, his deputy, and the cashmaster — a procedural formality that became a minor administrative burden when multiplied across tens of thousands of printed pieces.