50 Heller, Marktgemeinde Leonfelden, 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.

Leonfelden is a market town in the Muehlviertel, the granite upland between Linz and the Bohemian border. Its council resolved on 17 March 1920 to issue vouchers valid four weeks after they were called in, and not beyond 31 August 1920, against a cover sum lodged at the municipal office. The set was drawn by Emil Prietzel of Steyr, and it is one of the better pieces of design in this group: hand-lettered blackletter display, a view of the market square with the parish church, and on the fifty a bird's-eye prospect captioned Alt-Leonfelden im Jahre 1776 - the town as it looked a century and a half earlier.

The fifty also carries the line that sums up the whole phenomenon, set in a panel at the bottom of the face: In der Zeit der Not - war's ein Gebot. In a time of need, it was a necessity.