50 Heller

Altaist is a small municipality in Upper Austria, and this note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austrian communities after the First World War left the new republic's monetary system in pieces. Local governments printed their own emergency small-change notes because coins had effectively vanished — hoarded, melted, or simply never reminted in sufficient quantity after the collapse of the Habsburg economy.

The three signatures — Bürgermeister and both Vizebürgermeister — reflect a deliberate show of municipal authority on a piece of paper that had no legal standing beyond community trust. Druck A. Kling operated out of Linz-Urfahr, the northern bank suburb of Linz, a modest commercial printer doing what dozens of regional shops were doing in 1920.