50 Heller Hausmening

Hausmening is a small village in Lower Austria, and this 50 Heller note is a product of the notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities after the collapse of the Habsburg economy left small-denomination coinage almost entirely absent from circulation. Thousands of parishes and towns printed their own emergency scrip between 1919 and 1922, and the quality varied enormously — F. Kielar was a regional Amstetten printer, not a specialist security press, which is exactly what you'd expect for a village issue of this scale.

Three signatories authenticated each note: the mayor, deputy mayor, and a single council member. That level of bureaucratic formality on a piece of emergency paper says something about how seriously these communities took the legal legitimacy of what they were doing.