30 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920

Notgeld der Lebensmittelausgabestelle der Stadtgemeinde Eferding

very common

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.

Eferding's notes are not the town's money. They were issued by its Lebensmittelausgabestelle

the municipal food distribution office - and dated 1 June 1920, guaranteeing redemption in legal tender by a closing date to be announced publicly. That is a different thing from a council's general-purpose scrip: this is ration-shop change, printed by the office that stood between a hungry town and what food there was.

The designs say so. Where other communes put castles and mountains on their notes, Eferding put a milk can, a cow standing over her calf, a hen with her chick, and a heaped bowl of food beside an empty one under the words Einst und Jetzt - once and now. The set was drawn by L. Haase junior and printed by the Pura works in Linz, and it is the bleakest and best piece of graphic argument in this whole group of notes: a food office illustrating its own scrip with the food nobody had.

Symbology

The scene: The face shows a cow standing over her calf, cut in green on grey card.
The cow and calf: A cow standing over her calf, drawn large enough to fill half the note. The office that issued this paper rationed milk, and the reverse of the same note prints a milk can with the word MILCH on it. Between the two faces the note names the commodity it existed to distribute.
The scales: A balance appears on the reverse of the fifty. The food office weighed out rations; putting its scales on its money is the same gesture as a bank putting its building on a banknote.
No closing date: Alone among the notes here, Eferding's promise names no date - only “the closing date publicly announced”. The office could not say when the shortage would end, so it did not pretend to.
The format of the set: The fifteen and the thirty stand upright, taller than they are wide, with the denomination across the head and the office's name across the foot; the fifty lies the other way to fit its two dishes side by side. A set assembled one note at a time as the office needed it, rather than designed as a set.

Rarity

Austrian communal Notgeld is catalogued by locality in Kodnar and Kuenstner's standard work; the number for this note is not yet confirmed against it. As a class these notes are abundant - they were printed in far greater numbers than the shortage required, and much of the output went straight into albums and never circulated, so unused examples are commoner than used ones.

30 Heller, food office of Eferding, 1920

What was happening

1 copy in the collection