50 Heller Spitz an der Donau

Spitz an der Donau issued this Heller note as part of Austria's widespread Notgeld explosion following the collapse of the Habsburg economy — small municipalities across the country were forced to plug a chronic shortage of small change that the central authorities couldn't address. What distinguishes the Spitz series is the local artistic investment: Knausgruber was engaged as a painter-designer, and Eduard Sieger's engraving work lifts these notes well above the cruder emergency issues produced by comparable Wachau villages.

The print run of over twelve million for a village of this size almost certainly reflects wholesale production for collector distribution — a deliberate secondary market that many Niederösterreich communes openly exploited by 1920.