70 Heller Mutters

Mutters is a small village south of Innsbruck, and this 70 Heller note is a product of Austria's Notgeld crisis — the period after 1918 when the collapse of the Habsburg monetary system left municipalities scrambling to issue their own emergency scrip simply to make change. The denomination itself is telling: 70 Heller was an unusual, awkward figure, chosen not for elegance but because that is what the local economy actually needed at that moment.

Three signatories — the Bürgermeister and two deputies — were required to validate the issue, a formality that gave these tiny village notes a veneer of municipal authority in a period when that authority was itself newly uncertain, Tyrol having only just been severed from its southern territories by the postwar settlement.