Just do not breathe in caustic soda again. He was just thinking he had burned his lungs. With quick strokes, Fynn Kliemann strokes the lye over the wooden plate. It's supposed to make the best table in the world - he says. Only his gloves loosen up instead of the green paint. And his hat right with you. Fynn Kliemann jumps away from the table, which still has a lot in front of him, he wants to be the best in the world.

Two and a half years and over one and a half million clicks, the video is old. What happened since then? 780,000 YouTube subscribers, its own broadcast on funk, the young program of ARD and ZDF, three awards, including an "EinsLive" crown, over three acres of farm land, a record label, a book, an antique shop, a design label Album and the houseboat of Gunter Gabriel, the Kliemann bought together with Olli Schulz for 30,000 euros. "Everything is accidentally a job," says Kliemann and pushes his cap up, "I have no hobbies."

photo gallery


11 pictures

Fynn Kliemann: How does he do that?

A visit to the 28-year-old in his homeland, in the countryside between Hamburg and Bremen: red brick houses, fields, the school bus sneaks through the villages twice a day, otherwise hums tractors. Here in Rüspel, around the 200 inhabitants and again so many cows, the Kliemannsland, real place and virtual broadcast at the same time arises. Digital dropout utopia clings to Astrid Lindgren's Bullerbü. Fynn Kliemann, that's an attitude to life: scrape off rust, piece to it, "shit" roar, repainting. The Millennial yearning for self-sufficiency, for the village, freedom and grandpa's self-fueled - nowhere is it served as well as here.

"I hate that word, Commune, because you immediately think that all here in tie-dyed pants hang and kiffen," says Kliemann, lets hang the long limbs on a wooden chair and laughs hoarsely. "Everyone is working here, it's a place full of doers." Online, you can watch him and his employees doing the following: Between 600,000 and over one million views, the videos of his YouTube channel - they are about "demolish barn", "pond digging", "beer brewing".

DISPLAY

Buy MP3

at

Buy MP3

at

Since Kliemann bought the farm - seven buildings and a lot of land around it - "build shit, shoot up rockets, wrap barns and so on", 15 employees have come to it, event managers, producers, editors, helpers. Some now live on the farmstead, their colorful trailer in the garden next to vegetable patch and swimming pond. It is part of the charm that everyone acts as if they finally set their last pub idea here.

At first glance, Kliemann also fulfills a stereotype of neoliberal ideology, flatly said: If one wants to create something, he has to do it himself. If you want a pond, you have to dig it yourself. And if you want to demolish the barn, you have to swing the wrecking ball. At the same time, village life simply works just as well - where there is little, much depends on one's own creativity.

"One forfeits in many places"

"Everything has rules, frames, fences, but here everything is free, anyone can do what they want, and I think the world needs a place like this," says Kliemann. That sounds pathetic. At the same time, Kliemann's success proves that 48,788 people have meanwhile registered on the homepage as citizens of the "creative free state". If Kliemann organizes a market, the whole village has to be closed because so many want to participate.

"If you say that it's just awesome, that's a lie," says Kliemann. "You lose in many places: I do not have a weekend, do not go on vacation, work from morning to night and do not sleep much, but that's what I put on myself, apparently I need it." He just does not let his followers feel that. "You're a guy you'd like to go out for a beer with" someone wrote under a video. It seems he is one like everyone else. And everyone is like him. Or want to be happy.

Brian Jakubowski / Kliemannsland

Kliemannsland

Of course, this supposed Normalo-proximity is also principle. Kliemann is a media and marketing professional. After training as a media designer, he founded an advertising agency. They still exist today. It's the bread job he uses to fund all the other projects, he says. If he still really needs it?

With "Never" Kliemann released his first album in September. A good pop album, because Kliemann has a distinctive, hoarse voice that is often compared to Henning May by AnnenMayKantereit, and writes lyrics that are so simple that you can quickly keep them. And in a straight way so nice that you like to keep it.

Because the CD should not rot on any Grabbeltisch, he decided to an action that is also a pretty good marketing trick: It should only pressed as many plates as pre-ordered, then the album should never be physically available again. 96,434 people have agreed to it. A paragraph that major labels dream of. If you still want to have the record today, you have to spend around 200 euros - and buy second-hand.

"It's like driving full throttle all year, and behind you is a huge bow wave that's getting bigger and bigger," he says now. Not that he is afraid of a tsunami. He would probably surf on it. And make falling into an internet-ethic.