20 Heller, Stadtgemeinde Baden, 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.

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.