Thanks, Igor, for the hint. The bootloader prints its version as "U-Boot 2015.07-dirty (Aug 05 2015 - 09:17:32 +0200) Allwinner Technology". Moreover, the bootloader part of the SDcard compares equal to the u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin file from your Debian jessie image:
dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1k skip=8 | cmp - /usr/lib/linux-u-boot-cubietruck_4.1_armhf/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin End of file on /usr/lib/...
So, is this the wrong bootloader? Which other bootloader could I try?