80 Heller Grünbach bei Freistadt

An Austrian Notgeld piece from the post-WWI period, when hundreds of small municipalities printed their own emergency fractional currency to address the catastrophic coin shortage that followed the collapse of the Habsburg economy. Grünbach bei Freistadt is a small Upper Austrian village; that a community of this size commissioned its own printed issue from a Linz printer — L. Haase — rather than handwriting or rubber-stamping a local solution reflects how organized and widespread the Notgeld system had become by 1920.

The dual signatures of the mayor Firklbauer and his deputy Leopold Fischerlehner are typical of the legitimizing formality these tiny issuances required to gain local acceptance.