50 Heller, Gemeinde Fieberbrunn, 1919

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.

Fieberbrunn is a village in the Kitzbühel Alps that made an unusually ambitious set: six denominations from 10 to 99 Heller, all dated 1919, all first printing, all from Wagner in Innsbruck. The denominations give the game away. A shop needs 10 and 20 Heller notes; nobody needs 75 or 99. Those values exist because a collector completing a set will buy all six, and because a note of 99 Heller is a note that will never be spent as change.

What the commune bought with the proceeds was a series of woodcut views of its own valley - the Wildseeloder, the Wildalpsee, the Walchau, the Venediger group seen from the Loderspitz - and two pieces of local memory: the healing spring the village is named for, and the rifleman-captain who led its men in 1809.