50 Heller, Marktgemeinde Poysdorf, 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.

Poysdorf is the centre of the Weinviertel, the wine quarter in the far north-east of Lower Austria towards the Moravian border. It issued a hundred thousand Kronen in fifty-Heller notes, accepted to 31 December 1920 and redeemable in the last fortnight of that month.

Like Abstetten and Baden it explains itself in verse, and Poysdorf's is the frankest of the three:

In Poysdorf liegt manch' Tropfen Wein, / Doch mangelt es am Gelde klein; / Drum schickten wir dies Blaettchen aus, / Aus vielen wird ein Glaeschen draus.

There is many a drop of wine in Poysdorf, but small money is short; so we sent out this little leaf, and out of a lot of them comes a glass. A wine town with full cellars and no coins, printing paper so that a glass could still be bought.