50 Heller St. Peter in der Au

St. Peter in der Au is a market town in Lower Austria, and this 50 Heller note is a product of the postwar Notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities between 1920 and 1921 — when the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left small-denomination coinage essentially absent from everyday commerce. Local governments printed their own stop-gap paper rather than watch retail trade seize up entirely.

F. Prietzel was a Steyr-based printer with no particular prestige in the Notgeld trade, which puts this squarely in the utilitarian camp of the genre. Three signatories — the mayor, deputy mayor, and finance officer — authenticated the issue, a formality that gave the notes at least the appearance of municipal authority.