50 Heller, Gemeinde Ranshofen, 1920
Gutschein der Gemeinde Ranshofen
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00327
- Series year
- 1920
- Actually issued
- 1920
- mayor
- Georg Gross (Georg Groß) certain
Set in type on the note rather than signed.
- Grade
- XF (IBNS)
A pale stain across the upper left of the reverse and light overall toning; the printed landscape is clean and unfolded. 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
- $3.5 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
- Dimensions
- 106.8 × 65.6 mm (±0.6, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldEmergency moneyUpper AustriaLocal designWoodcut designFirst Austrian Republic
The type
- Type
- 50 Heller, Gemeinde Ranshofen, 1920
- Printer
- Stampfl u. Co., Braunau
- Rarity
- very common
Inscriptions
Die Gemeinde Ranshofen haftet fuer dieses Notgeld und loest selbes nur vom 15. bis 30. Nov. 1920 in gesetzlichem Gelde ein. Georg Gross, Buergermeister. Jede Nachahmung wird bestraft.
The commune of Ranshofen stands behind this emergency money and will redeem it in legal money only between 15 and 30 November 1920. Georg Gross, mayor. Any counterfeiting will be punished.
Symbology
- The Inn valley
- A wide, low landscape in olive green: water meadows, the river, and the priory church of Ranshofen on its rise. Drawn without a border, so it runs off the edges of the note.
- v. Preen
- The artist's signature and the date 1920 in the lower right. The same hand signed Handenberg's fifty-Heller note a short way up the Inn; a single local artist supplying several neighbouring communes is the usual pattern in this material.
- A fortnight to redeem
- Fifteen days, and then nothing. The shorter the window, the smaller the cover a commune needed to hold - and the more of its notes stayed permanently in albums.
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.
Ranshofen sits on the Inn just south of Braunau, on the Bavarian border. It had an Augustinian priory from the eleventh century, suppressed like Erla's convent under Joseph II.
The note is signed in the plate v. Preen 1920 - the same hand that drew Handenberg's duck a few kilometres up the same river, and the reason the two notes look like a pair. It is the quietest design in this whole Austrian group: no frame to speak of, no lettering across the picture, just a wide olive-green landscape of the Inn valley with the priory church on its rise, the denomination in the top corner, and the name of the place in the top left. It reads as a print that happens to be worth fifty Heller.
Redemption was a fortnight: 15 to 30 November 1920, on the signature of the mayor Georg Gross, printed at Stampfl in Braunau.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Heller, Gemeinde Ranshofen, 1920 in the collection.
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