50 Heller St. Veit an der Gölsen

St. Veit an der Gölsen is a small market town in Lower Austria, and this 50 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities between 1919 and 1921 — a direct consequence of the currency chaos that followed the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the severe coin shortage that came with it. Local governments printed their own emergency small-change scrip simply because there was nothing else to put in a pocket.

The designer credit to E. Deutsch is one of the few concrete details that distinguishes this from the hundreds of anonymous municipal issues of the same period.