15 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920

Notgeld der Lebensmittelausgabestelle der Stadtgemeinde Eferding

Reverse of 15 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920 — Reverse 600 dpi

This copy

Accession: OM-00294
Series year: 1920
Actually issued: 1920
mayor: not read unread
Signed by hand in ink; the hand is not resolvable at 600 dpi.
Grade: UNC (IBNS)
Printed on blue-green card, uniface design both sides. Strong colour. As issued: full body, square corners, bright unfaded ink and no fold through the design. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which shows folds, soiling and edge condition but not paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $7 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 34.6 × 55.4 mm (±1.1, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Emergency money Upper Austria Rationing Local design First Austrian Republic

The type

Type: 15 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 a hen with her chick in a farmyard, cut in dark purple on blue-green card.
The hen and chick: A hen with her chick, by a fence in a farmyard. Eggs, like milk, were rationed through the office that issued the note. The series runs on livestock rather than landscape: a cow on the thirty, a hen on the fifteen, and on the fifty a full dish beside an empty one.
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 15 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920 in the collection.

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