10 Heller, Gemeinde Golling, 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.

Golling lies in the Salzach valley south of Salzburg, under the Tennengebirge, at the mouth of the gorge the river cuts through on its way north. Its two notes are redeemable to 31 December 1920 by the market-town council and are signed by hand - one of the few issues in this group where you can see the actual pen.

The design is the most severe in the set and the most modern-looking: black and pale green only, a chequered border of solid squares, and a woodcut of the valley cut in hard parallel line. No arms, no verse, no blackletter. It could be a Wiener Werkstaette exercise, and the resemblance is not accidental - the graphic style that Austrian emergency money reached for in 1920 came straight out of the Vienna workshops of the previous decade.