The Devil of the Kalkberg

From the height of the Segeberg rock, they say, the devil looked one evening to the east, to where the Plön country lies. He saw the many lakes in the evening light, the green hills, the castle on its hill, and he saw the people who lived there in peace and prosperity. Their piety and their happiness galled him to the marrow. Why, he thought, should such a land be so fair and yet none of it belong to him.

Envy gave him no rest. He resolved to shatter all that glory and to bury the land under stone and water. He set himself on the Kalkberg, the highest point far and wide, drew back his heavy silver hammer and aimed across at Plön. A single throw, he thought, and of all the splendour nothing would remain but a crater full of mud.

With all his strength he hurled the hammer through the night. But the throw went wrong, not as he had thought. The iron came loose from the handle and flew past its mark, so that it came down far across, one piece at Pehmen by the Plön lake, the other at the estate of Seedorf. Where the hammer struck it tore deep hollows in the earth, and these hollows filled with water. So, the old folk say, arose the many lakes of the Plön country, each a crater from that night.

Rage seized the devil, for he had hit nothing. Some tell that a second giant stood up on the Plön castle hill and threw back with his own hammer, and that the two never reached each other across all those miles. But on the Segeberg rock there remained what the devil no longer carried off: the Kalkberg itself, his failed work, which ever since rises from the flat landscape like a monument to his wrath.

The truth behind the rock is hardly less strange than the legend. Despite its name the Kalkberg is not made of limestone at all, but at the surface of gypsum and at its core of anhydrite, laid down some two hundred and fifty million years ago by a sea long vanished. Beneath it lies a salt dome that still lifts the mountain one to two millimetres year after year. Only for that reason does it rise at all above the plain shaped by the ice ages, in which nothing around it is like it. Once it was over a hundred and ten metres high and was called the Alberg; on its back stood the Siegesburg, which Emperor Lothar had founded in the year 1134 and which the Swedes destroyed in the Thirty Years War.

After that people quarried the gypsum away, century after century, from the summit down, until the mountain had lost nine tenths of its mass and only today’s ninety-one metres remained. Only in 1931 did the quarrying end. Already in 1913 the Kalkberg caves had been discovered within, where today tens of thousands of bats overwinter and the Segeberg cave beetle, which lives nowhere else, makes its home. Since 1952 the Karl May plays have been staged in the old quarry before the rock face, and from the summit platform the view reaches in clear weather as far as the towers of Lübeck. No one there speaks any longer of the devil’s hammer, yet why this pale rock stands so alone on the plain, science explains hardly less astonished than the old legend.