Hundreds of Harry Potter fans dressed as the fictional wizard boy who gathered in the northern German city of Hamburg on Saturday successfully broke the world record for the most Harry Potters known to have gathered in one place.

A total of 1,748 impersonators met in downtown Hamburg, all dressed in black capes with round glasses and Potter's lightning bolt scar on their forehead. Their gathering surpassed the previous world record of 997 costumed Harry Potter fans.

German actor Rufus Beck, who narrates the audiobooks in German, as Steven Fry famously did in English, was a guest of honor at the event.

According to the regional broadcaster NDR, there were even more costumed fans who wanted to take part in the event. However, not all of them made it into the cordoned-off area in front of Hamburg City Hall. A total of more than 4,400 people came to the festival, police said.

25 years of Pottermania in Germany

The event was dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the publication of the German translation of the first Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." JK Rowling's bestseller first appeared in English a year earlier, in 1997.

The original Harry Potter series consists of seven books published in 1997-2007, and each book follows the young wizard and his friends through a school year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A later eighth Harry Potter book was written as a play, which premiered in 2016.

The Harry Potter series has become a global cultural phenomenon, with the books being read by millions of people around the world. They were also turned into a blockbuster series of movies. 

Well over 30 million Potter books have been sold in the German language alone, and that's based on data that's a few years out of date now.

German publisher Klaus Humann, from the Carlsen children's book publisher, recalled that he did not have to fight too hard for the German rights to the first book back in the late 1990s. 

"It wasn't that great at all," Humann said, when asked how much German interest there was in the first part of the series in an interview with German magazine Stern this weekend. "There were a few interested parties, but some of them then decided they didn't like it and others withdrew immediately, because they thought it was too long. Back then, publishing houses believed that children would not manage to read books more than 176 pages long. And Harry Potter had more than 300 pages." 

Rowling famously had similar difficulties getting the book published in the UK in the first place, facing rejection from a dozen British publishing houses before Bloomsbury decided to take a gamble on what would become one of modern fiction's best-known franchises.

dh/msh (dpa)