The female elephant Tuffi has a firm place in the hearts of not only the people of Wuppertal to this day.
In Wuppertal itself there are two monuments to Tuffi, one in the pedestrian zone, another roughly at the point in the Wupper where the elephant cow landed in a mud hole 72 years ago after a spectacular jump from the suspension railway.
On July 21, 1950, Franz Althoff let Tuffi ride the Schwebahn to promote his circus.
But because the crowd in the gondola, which was overflowing with reporters and photographers, was probably too much for the otherwise balanced elephant cow, she took to her heels and broke through the wall.
A sculpture created by Jörg Mazur in Oberhausen is a reminder of this.
You can see a bronze Tuffi as if striding through the air.
The elephant is framed by four steel arches, which were once made in Oberhausen for the famous Schwebahn - which would have made the connection to Wuppertal.
Oberhausen has its own Tuffi history.
Althoff – who regularly did circus marketing with sensational campaigns – had taken the animal on the Oberhausen tram to the town hall a few days before the suspension railway collapsed.
There were only relatively harmless incidents that could hardly be portrayed in bronze: Tuffi ate a houseplant and a bouquet of flowers for dessert and urinated on the carpeting.