50 Heller Seitenstetten

Seitenstetten is a small market town in Lower Austria best known for its Benedictine abbey, and this Heller note is one of the thousands of small-denomination Notgeld issues that flooded Austria between 1919 and 1921. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian crown after the First World War left local municipalities unable to obtain enough low-denomination coinage to conduct ordinary commerce — metal was scarce, and the new Austrian state could not mint fast enough to fill the gap. Individual communes were effectively forced to print their own.

J. Kielar was a small Amstetten printer, not a specialist security press, which is typical of the emergency nature of the issue. Hans Kozak's design credit is worth noting — many rural Notgeld commissions went to local commercial artists whose names rarely surface anywhere else in the historical record.