90 Heller Klaus

Klaus is a small municipality in Vorarlberg, and this 90 Heller note is a product of the Notgeld wave that swept Austria after the First World War — a period when coin shortages were so severe that hundreds of individual villages and towns printed their own emergency fractional currency. The denomination itself, 90 Heller, is characteristic of the period's odd arithmetic: issuers often chose unconventional values to discourage hoarding and force eventual redemption.

Printed by F. Sertenberg in Vienna, it bears three local signatories — the mayor, his deputy, and the treasurer — giving it a bureaucratic legitimacy that distinguished municipal Notgeld from purely commercial scrip.