‘The Devil and the Hare’

Located along the Elbe River in Hamburg’s affluent Teufelsbrück (“Devil’s Bridge”) district, a sandstone sculpture depicts a horned creature lost in thought, holding a small hare by one ear. The work, called Der Teufel und der Hase (“The Devil and the Hare”), captures a famous local legend.

Folklore holds that a young carpenter, struggling to build a bridge over marshy ground in the neighborhood, made a pact with the devil, trading the soul of the first creature to cross the finished bridge for supernatural help. After the structure was completed and blessed, a hare crossed it first, thwarting the fiend’s expectation of a human soul. According to the legend, he then vanished into the surrounding marshland, giving the area its name.

The sculpture’s real-world history has been almost as turbulent as its legend. Since the first figure was erected in the late 1920s, the devil has been stolen, damaged, or removed repeatedly. Wooden versions disappeared outright, while later iterations vanished overnight, only to resurface years later in private apartments, sometimes stripped of dignity and put to mundane use. By the 1980s, the tally had reached six stolen or destroyed devils, turning a folkloric monument into a recurring civic problem.

Since 2000, the riverbank has been occupied by a more resolute incarnation, carved from Elbe sandstone by local stonemason Bert Ulrich Beppler. Weighing close to a metric ton (about 2,200 pounds), the sculpture was meant to end the cycle of theft. Although removal is no longer feasible, some vandalism has continued. Even so, it remains at Teufelsbrück, making it the longest-surviving version of a figure Hamburg has consistently failed to hold on to.