50 Heller Schardenberg

Schardenberg is a small parish municipality in Upper Austria, and like hundreds of similar communities, it resorted to printing its own emergency currency — Notgeld — during the acute coin shortage that followed the First World War. The Austrian state simply could not produce enough small-denomination coinage to meet daily transactional demand, and municipalities, businesses, and even private institutions stepped in to fill the gap between roughly 1919 and 1921.

The Bürgermeister's manuscript or stamped signature authenticating issue was legally required under the informal conventions governing local Notgeld — without it, the note carried no municipal backing whatsoever. Matth. Maier signing as Bürgermeister gives this piece its only official sanction.