50 Heller, Gemeinde Abstetten, 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.

Abstetten is a small commune in the Tullnerfeld, the plain west of Vienna. Its three notes are dated May 1920 and were redeemable in the last fortnight of December that year, on the signature of the mayor J. Brandsteidl. What makes them worth reading is the verse. Each denomination carries four lines of doggerel on the back, and between the three of them they admit exactly what this money was for:

Wir grenzen an das Tullnerfeld / Und leiden auch in herber Not. / Nun schufen wir papier'nes Geld / Zu kaufen drum das liebe Brot.

• we border the Tullnerfeld and we too are in bitter need, so we have made paper money to buy our daily bread with. And then, on the ten:

  Heimset fleissig ein, / Ihr Sammler all! / Nehmt auch uns're Schein' / Auf jeden Fall!

• collect away, all you collectors, and be sure to take ours too. The same set of notes pleads poverty and solicits the collector trade, four lines apart.