Here’s an interesting pair of stamps that I found while sorting through some unfiled Austrian stuff. My first thought was “that’s an interesting color for a cancel,” but upon closer examination this isn’t something I’ve ever seen.

After closer inspection, I realized the cancel/overprint (I don’t know which it is) actually says “Deutsch Österreich” as opposed to the name of a town. This is why I can’t tell if it might be some kind of overprint that was used during the transition after the end of WWI.

I used an amazing site — Postmark Reveal — to extract the postmark/overprint. See below:

That site is amazing…it generated a series of images that were of varying shades, some with black backgrounds almost like a negative (like the above) and others that were with white backgrounds. Some of the images made the stamp stand out, others made the overprint/postmark stand out. I chose the above because it was the clearest example.

I then “traced” over it in image editing software — and I’ve arrived at the below. This is what the actual stamp design is.

I am unable to find any information about this. I’ve looked through postmark catalogs and I’ve spent hours searching online. Since I don’t know for sure what it is, I am not sure if there’s a search term that would be better for me to use. A friend on Discord told me it might be a fiscal cancel — but even searching that term doesn’t yield anything similar. I’ve tried feeding this image into Google lens as well.

Please reach out if you recognize this and have any information about it!