50 Heller Schönau an der Triesting

Schönau an der Triesting is a small municipality in Lower Austria, and this 50 Heller note is one of thousands of Notgeld issues produced by Austrian towns and villages between 1919 and 1921 to address the acute small-change shortage that followed the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system. The newly established Austrian republic had no mechanism to flood the provinces with coin, and local authorities — including obscure rural Gemeinden like this one — simply printed their own emergency fractional currency. Robert Hauser's signature as issuing authority is the only administrative trace most of these villages left on the historical record.