5 Heller Schwanenstadt

Schwanenstadt's municipal emergency currency was issued in the wake of the catastrophic coin shortage that gripped Austria in the years immediately following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Small denominations like this 5 Heller note were produced by hundreds of Austrian towns and market communes — a phenomenon known as Notgeld — filling a vacuum the new republican government was slow to address. The printer E. Prietzel operated out of Steyr, a small industrial town roughly 20 kilometers from Schwanenstadt, making this a genuinely local production rather than one farmed out to Vienna.