10 Heller Eschenau

Eschenau is a small market town in the Pielach valley of Lower Austria, and like hundreds of similarly sized municipalities, it issued its own emergency small-change notes during the acute coin shortage that gripped Austria from roughly 1916 onward. These Notgeld pieces filled the gap left by the wartime hoarding and melting of metal coinage — a problem that persisted well past the armistice and into the early 1920s.

The Jaksch/Pick reference JPR0186c places this within the documented Lower Austrian municipal series, though surviving examples from Eschenau are genuinely uncommon. Small-run local issues like this were rarely printed in large quantities and often redeemed quickly once regional banking functions stabilized.