50 Heller Preinsbach

Preinsbach is a small village in Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities, it issued emergency small-change notes — Notgeld — during the severe coin shortage that followed the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. The Austrian federal government was slow to address the gap, leaving individual Gemeinden to print their own fractional scrip. F. Seitenberg operated from Vienna's third district and handled a considerable volume of these municipal commissions in 1920, producing workmanlike but locally distinctive results.

The issuing authority had no banking infrastructure of its own. Redemption depended entirely on local goodwill and municipal funds — which is precisely why so many of these small Gemeinde notes were never redeemed at all.