50 Heller Tragwein

Tragwein is a small rural commune in Upper Austria, and this Heller note is a product of the postwar Notgeld wave that swept Austrian municipalities between 1919 and 1921. With the old Habsburg currency infrastructure collapsed and small coinage essentially vanished from circulation, hundreds of communities — including ones barely large enough to warrant a post office — printed their own emergency fractional notes. Tragwein was among the smaller issuers.

M. Distlinger's design credit is uncommon enough to be worth noting; most village-level Notgeld was farmed out to regional commercial printers with no individual designer credited at all.