20 Heller, Stadtgemeinde Baden, 1920
Kassenschein der Stadt-Gemeinde Baden ueber Zwanzig Heller
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00301
- Series year
- 1920
- Actually issued
- 1920
- mayor
- Josef Kollmann probable
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms. Josef Kollmann was mayor of Baden bei Wien from 1919; the reading fits his term.
- deputy_mayor
- not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
- councillor
- not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
- Grade
- UNC (IBNS)
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
- 76.1 × 50.9 mm (±0.5, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldEmergency moneyLower AustriaSpa townVerseFirst Austrian Republic
The type
- Type
- 20 Heller, Stadtgemeinde Baden, 1920
- Printer
- M. Salzer, Wien
- Rarity
- very common
Inscriptions
Fuer Kranke den Schwefel, fuer Gesunde den Wein: So kann ich ein Kurort fuer jedermann sein.
Sulphur for the sick, wine for the healthy - so I can be a spa for everybody.
Die Stadtgemeinde Baden loest diesen Kassenschein vom 1. bis 31. Dezember 1920 im gesetzlichen Bargelde ein.
The town of Baden will redeem this treasury note in legal tender between 1 and 31 December 1920.
Symbology
- The Rauhenstein valley
- The vignette looks up the Helenental, the wooded gorge behind the town with its ruined castles - the walk every nineteenth-century visitor to Baden was taken on.
- Sulphur and wine
- The two industries of the Thermenlinie, where hot springs and vineyards surface along the same geological fault. The note claims both in four lines and makes a virtue of having to.
- A spa without an empire
- Baden's season had been built on Vienna's court, its army command and its money, and in 1920 all three were gone. Emergency money was one of the few kinds of printing a town could still afford to advertise itself with.
- M. Salzer in Wien
- Printed in Vienna rather than locally. Towns close to the capital used capital printers, which is why their notes are more conventionally typeset than the village woodcuts.
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.
Baden bei Wien was the imperial summer resort: sulphur springs, a casino, and the town where the Austro-Hungarian high command sat for the last two years of the war. In 1920 it needed small change like everywhere else, and its note is redeemable in the last month of the year.
The reverse gives it four lines that do the town's advertising for it:
Fuer Kranke den Schwefel, / Fuer Gesunde den Wein: / So kann ich ein Kurort / Fuer jedermann sein.
Sulphur for the sick, wine for the healthy - so I can be a spa for everybody. Baden sits in the Thermenlinie, where the hot springs and the vineyards run along the same fault, and the verse is not a flourish: it is a resort that had lost its imperial clientele making a pitch to whoever was left.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 20 Heller, Stadtgemeinde Baden, 1920 in the collection.
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