50 Heller, Gemeinde Ranshofen, 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.

Ranshofen sits on the Inn just south of Braunau, on the Bavarian border. It had an Augustinian priory from the eleventh century, suppressed like Erla's convent under Joseph II.

The note is signed in the plate v. Preen 1920 - the same hand that drew Handenberg's duck a few kilometres up the same river, and the reason the two notes look like a pair. It is the quietest design in this whole Austrian group: no frame to speak of, no lettering across the picture, just a wide olive-green landscape of the Inn valley with the priory church on its rise, the denomination in the top corner, and the name of the place in the top left. It reads as a print that happens to be worth fifty Heller.

Redemption was a fortnight: 15 to 30 November 1920, on the signature of the mayor Georg Gross, printed at Stampfl in Braunau.