80 Heller Lebing

Lebing is a small parish in Styria, and this 80 Heller note is a product of the Austrian Notgeld wave that followed the economic dislocation of the immediate postwar period. With the old Habsburg monetary system in collapse and coin hoarding rampant, hundreds of tiny municipalities — Lebing among them — were legally permitted to issue their own emergency fractional currency. The 80 Heller denomination is an odd one, not the round figures most communities chose, which suggests it was calculated to fill a specific local gap in circulation rather than issued speculatively.

Karl Ohlinger, who signed as issuing authority, was almost certainly the municipal administrator rather than a treasury official in any formal sense.