50 Heller, Gemeinde Handenberg, 1920

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.

Handenberg is a village in the Innviertel, on the flat ground near the Bavarian border above Braunau. Its voucher was redeemable in a fortnight - between 15 and 31 October 1920 - and carries three signatures in type: the mayor Mathias Hochradl and the first and second councillors, Johann Fischereder and Martin Schoefecker. It was printed twenty kilometres away at Stampfl in Braunau am Inn.

The design is signed v. Preen in the plate. The face is given over to a duck swimming in a wreath, cut in heavy line against vertical hatching, with a strip of marshland below it - the Innviertel wetlands, which is what Handenberg had instead of mountains.