80 Heller, Gemeinde Obritzberg, 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.

Obritzberg is a commune in Lower Austria west of St. Poelten, and its notes are valid to the last day of 1920 on the signature of its mayor alone.

The face is one long woodcut of the hill the parish is named for: a road winding up through orchards and vine rows to the church on the summit, drawn wide and low so it runs the whole width of the note. The denomination sits in a small panel at the left, out of the way of the view.

Two denominations were issued, twenty and eighty Heller. The eighty is the tell. A voucher of eighty Heller is not change for anything; it is a number chosen so that a set is a set, and that is what the second denomination of most Austrian communes was for by the middle of 1920.