50 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920

Notgeld der Lebensmittelausgabestelle der Stadtgemeinde Eferding

Reverse of 50 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920 — Reverse 600 dpi

This copy

Accession: OM-00280
Series year: 1920
Actually issued: 1920
mayor: not read unread
Signed by hand in ink; the hand is not resolvable at 600 dpi.
Grade: AU (IBNS)
Printed on green card. Bright, with light corner wear at the lower right. About uncurrent: bright and unfolded, with light handling - a corner bump or a faint edge tone. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which cannot show paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $5 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 74 × 51.2 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Emergency money Upper Austria Rationing Local design First Austrian Republic

The type

Type: 50 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920
Printer: "Pura", Linz
Rarity: very common

EferdingAustria, 1920 borders

Inscriptions

Reverse - the guarantee

Notgeld der Lebensmittelausgabestelle der Stadtgemeinde Eferding. Die Stadtgemeinde Eferding haftet fuer die Einloesung dieses Notgeldes in gesetzlichem Bargelde bis zum oeffentlich verlautbarten Endtermin. Nachahmung wird bestraft. Eferding am 1. Juni 1920. Buergermeister.

Emergency money of the food distribution office of the town of Eferding. The town of Eferding stands behind the redemption of this emergency money in legal tender until the closing date publicly announced. Counterfeiting will be punished. Eferding, 1 June 1920. The mayor.

Symbology

The scene: The face shows two vignettes captioned *Einst und Jetzt* - a heaped bowl, and an empty one.
Einst und Jetzt: “Once and now.” A full dish on the left, an empty dish on the right, and the denomination between them. The food office of a small Austrian town in 1920 printed the argument for its own existence on its own money, and did it in two pictures and two words.
The scales: A balance appears on the reverse of the fifty. The food office weighed out rations; putting its scales on its money is the same gesture as a bank putting its building on a banknote.
No closing date: Alone among the notes here, Eferding's promise names no date - only “the closing date publicly announced”. The office could not say when the shortage would end, so it did not pretend to.
The format of the set: The fifteen and the thirty stand upright, taller than they are wide, with the denomination across the head and the office's name across the foot; the fifty lies the other way to fit its two dishes side by side. A set assembled one note at a time as the office needed it, rather than designed as a set.

What was happening

Austria in 1919 was a republic of six and a half million people left holding the currency of an empire of fifty. The Austro-Hungarian Bank was in liquidation, the peace treaties had cut the country off from most of its coal and much of its food, and small coin simply vanished: hoarded against worse to come, melted for the metal, or carried across the new frontiers where it bought more. Shops could not give change, and a country that cannot give change cannot trade.

So the communes printed their own. A council resolution, a local printer, a redemption date and the pledge of the commune's entire movable and immovable property - that was the whole legal apparatus behind several thousand separate issues of Heller notes between 1919 and 1921. Vienna tolerated it while it solved a real problem and moved to stop it in 1920, by which time the notes had found a second market: collectors would pay more than face value for a complete set, so a village could raise real money by printing money it hoped would never be presented. The artwork improved as the need receded.

Eferding's notes are not the town's money. They were issued by its Lebensmittelausgabestelle

the municipal food distribution office - and dated 1 June 1920, guaranteeing redemption in legal tender by a closing date to be announced publicly. That is a different thing from a council's general-purpose scrip: this is ration-shop change, printed by the office that stood between a hungry town and what food there was.

The designs say so. Where other communes put castles and mountains on their notes, Eferding put a milk can, a cow standing over her calf, a hen with her chick, and a heaped bowl of food beside an empty one under the words Einst und Jetzt - once and now. The set was drawn by L. Haase junior and printed by the Pura works in Linz, and it is the bleakest and best piece of graphic argument in this whole group of notes: a food office illustrating its own scrip with the food nobody had.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920 in the collection.

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