On the sidewalk in front of the bookstore is in the late afternoon no more getting through: Thousands of youth crowd in front of the Lübeck Hugendubel until the security forces let them in. "Monte, Monte", some are chanting, others are looking at their cell phones or taking pictures of the snake, which now extends to the side street.
Mostly boys are coming, many have their school bag, some have been waiting since the morning. A cyclist stops: "What's going on here?", She asks two women, who photograph the crowd from across the street. "A YouTuber has written a book," one of them replies. The cyclist shakes her head, waves off and drives on.
The creator who attracts the teenagers to the bookstore this Friday is MontanaBlack, bourgeois Marcel Eris. He has made a career as possible only on the Internet. He became known as a gamer who films while playing and shares this via Twitch and YouTube with the world. He has not only been playing for a long time. He tells and sends in his clips and streams also much of his everyday life.
On the YouTube channel MontanaBlack alone, Eris has around 1.9 million subscribers - a figure most German media dream of. The fans want to see how he plays and hear what he says. And lately they also want to read from him.
For now his autobiography has been released, "MontanaBlack - From Junkie to YouTuber". She immediately jumped to the top of the bestseller list. "You did not write the book yourself anyway," someone moaned on Twitter and was immediately rebuked by a fan: "Nobody really writes a book yourself, you post."
Written by author and "world" journalist Dennis Sand, based on extensive discussions. "He roughly said what it was like and then I wrote and offered a suitable text," says Sand. After that, go through each of the 267 pages together, add and correct it until a book emerges that actually sounds like Montana Black.
YouTube / Montana Black
Scene from a MontanaBlack video
The image of the bad boy
As MontanaBlack, Eris maintains the image of the Bad Boys in the streamer scene. He is considered a tough guy, with whom you better not to invest. When a Twitter user publicly complained that a man was sitting on the train legs apart, Eris commented, "Dumb woman ... ... look for hobbies :-) and at home you're the one who spreads her legs." He has hundreds of thousands of followers, many joined him.
"Of course, I could have clarified it more objectively," he told the SPIEGEL now in Lübeck, "but if the posts something men-offensive, I post just something female-contemptible." Basically, he has "no problem with women": "The dearest people in my life are women: my grandmother and my mother."
Eris sits in a chair, in another the fans are allowed to sit down for a photo, one after the other. Every meeting lasts between five and ten seconds. Thousands of times Ghettofaust, cool look, "Have a good time, brother".
Among the followers are strikingly few girls. "I'm just not a beauty-YouTuberin, the make-up or something, I'm basically talking to more male viewers," says Eris. "I also have some viewers, but maybe 1000 girls come for 1000 boys."
"Brother, that looks like shit"
One of them is the 17-year-old Eileen. She has been standing in front of the bookstore since 11.30 am, "I skipped my last lesson," she admits. Shortly before 16 o'clock it is her turn, get ready, photo. "I met Monte through my friend", she says, meanwhile she is a fan herself: "I just like his humor and his charisma."
Some greet Eris with a spell. "Brother, was the T-shirt also in your size?", He asks a teenager, another he puts the labels on the neck back into the sweater: "Brother, that looks like shit."
A boy in a white shirt breaks into tears as soon as he reaches the chair next to his idol. Eris comforts: "Come, sit down over there and calm down, we can not take a picture of someone sitting next to me howling, people think I bit you."
Erik "Gronkh" Range, who also became famous with Let's Play videos on YouTube, sees the thrill of the genre as it feels like sitting next to his big brother on the computer and watching him play.
Marcel Eris actually acts like a big brother in dealing with his fans. One that can be helped in case of stress. One that the louts are afraid of, because he has a lot on the record.
Claws, kippers, cokes
How much, says the book: In his youth, he sprayed graffiti, beat himself, stoned and stolen - tobacco, cell phones and purses. He even stole his own grandfather.
He talks about how he and his buddies bought the stolen credit card from a local shopkeeper in the electronics store who returned and cashed in another store. Or how he broke into houses with his friends. How he became more and more dependent on drugs. How he drank, how he got sick, how much he had done and finally found his way back to life through the detox clinic and then completed his training with as little work as possible. And finally, how he accidentally found a way to make money with computer games.
After six years on YouTube and Twitch, he has now bought two condos, he recently tweeted. "Earned!" Many fans write, "Respect for you, it is granted to you, at some point you will be rewarded for everything."
His broad fan community rejects any criticism. For example, when Eris was blocked for weeks by the platform Twitch for racist comments. He had spoken of a "slit eye" and said he "hate rain" - with the remark, one should read rain backwards.
He himself considers the excitement exaggerated to this day. "Anyone who haunts me a bit knows that if I said in a live stream, 'You fucking gypsy,' that was not against Gypsies, it was just an insult," he says now. "I have a lot of friends myself who are Gypsies who laugh at it when I say that."
If he makes a mess, then he'll apologize too, says Eris. "But I do not really have to apologize for a Gypsy saying because it's nothing wrong in this day and age."
"He does not represent a political ideology"
There is also criticism of Eris, because he bears his birth year 1988 as a tattoo on the hand and because the number 88 - a symbol used in the far-right scene - repeatedly appears in videos. His Twitch channel is also called MontanaBlack88.
"This has become a running gag," says Eris, "HH is also a right symbol, but not everyone with a Hamburg license plate is a Nazi." His mother is Turkish, "my last name is Eris, I'm half-Turk, and anyone who reproaches me for being a racist just has no idea."
Book author Sand also denies a right-wing attitude of the creator: "He can serve a lot, but not as a political projection screen," he says. "He does not speak political ideology, he just talks out of his gut."
The fact that cross-border and insulting things are said to belong to the successful concept. He does not want to be an idol, MontanaBlack said in an interview, despite millions of mostly youthful fans.
"In the gamer scene, it is similar to the rapper scene: there are no taboos," says author Sand, young people understand the codes: "We have a generation here that has a very different understanding of political correctness."
A pack of thousands of "brothers"
Marcel Eris himself says: "Often I say things and think afterwards about it, which is sometimes a curse for me, but at the same time a blessing, because people like that about me too, that I do not mince words. " For this text, all verbatim quotations were later submitted to him in writing - and released for publication without hesitation.
"MontanaBlack - from junkie to creator" is to tell the story of a simple guy from the town of Buxtehude, whose zip code he tattooed in the face. One who, despite his troubled life in his youth, made it out of simple circumstances. Like a hero's story, it works from one who is not fit for a hero.
Each of his sentences is absorbed by a large, young audience. If he posts something, many throw themselves unconditionally on his side. Scolds Eris publicly on someone, he possibly sends - voluntarily or not - a pack of thousands of "brothers" going on.
Apparently he has not arrived in this role yet. It had cost him "an incredible amount of energy" to take responsibility for himself, according to the book. "And now I'm supposed to take responsibility for all my viewers?"