50 Heller Klagenfurt

This note belongs to the vast wave of Austrian municipal emergency money — Notgeld — issued after the collapse of the Habsburg state left local authorities scrambling to plug a crippling shortage of small change. The central government in Vienna simply could not supply enough low-denomination coinage to meet everyday demand, and Klagenfurt, like hundreds of other towns, printed its own.

Klagenfurt's position made 1919 particularly fraught: the province of Carinthia was simultaneously fighting a guerrilla war against advancing Yugoslav forces and preparing for the 1920 plebiscite that would determine whether it remained Austrian at all.