The 21-year-old dedicated himself to working on building an apartment, which is not extraordinary for a man his age in Germany. What's extraordinary is that the home he was building was made of pushed paper beer coasters, which are common in restaurants all over the country. They are set on the table just before a cold brew is served, and sometimes waiters and waitresses doodle numbers on them to keep track of how many beers have been ordered.
Goebel spent up to eight hours a day, seven days a week working on the home, quitting only when his shoulders hurt, his leg muscles ached and his hip joint signaled pain. His goal was to build a life-size apartment complete with furnishings using a total of 300,000 beer coasters and to set a Guinness Book of World Records record by doing it. By succeeding, he beat the standing world record beer coaster assembly, which he already owned.
He built the house in a room inside a former elite school for Nazis, Burg Vogelsang near Gmuend, about 50 kilometers south-west of Cologne. From the windows of the facility there's a view of Urft Lake and the forests of Eifel National Park.
The beer coaster apartment, an amazing, beautiful and slightly crazy building, went up behind the thick walls of Burg Vogelsang.
Goebel arranges four beer coasters into two peaks and then places another coaster on the peaks as a roof.
“Every beer coaster must be supported by the other ones,” he said. “I can set up 1,000 in an hour.”
The walls of the 66-square-meter home were built using this method. They were 2 meters high and comprised more than 200,000 beer coasters.
Occasionally, a visitor behind a glass partition snaps a photograph, and every now and then someone from his home town, which is not far away, comes by when he builds. Otherwise, the 21-year-old is alone with his beer coasters.
“I have complete peace and quiet. My brain is shut down and there's nothing to get worked up about,” he said. He lapses into a meditative state similar to that reached by monks in isolation. When his mobile phone rings — loudly, demandingly, continually — he doesn't answer it.
He walks through his house barefoot. His feet are covered with Band-Aids, a result of practicing the martial arts. He considers the sport a type of spiritual training. And when he returns to work on his beer coaster home, “it's like meditation.”
His career as a builder began at the tender age of 5 when he went out to eat with his parents. After the meal his parents sat at the table for a while, and he grew impatient, wanting to leave. To entertain himself, he started stacking beer coasters and since then he hasn't been able to stop.
At some point he started collecting the coasters at home and to his delight visitors brought him even more — until it became too much for his parents. His grandmothers cleared out rooms and parts of their yards for the sake of his compulsion.
Seven years ago Goebel achieved his first beer coaster-stacking world record and one year later he reached his second using 70,000 coasters. In his last world record attempt he continued building till April 11. On that date, he invited local authority officials to come over to knock down Goebel's building with a few well-placed kicks.
Goebel isn't planning his life around building buildings out of beer coasters. He's waiting for an opening at university to study the business of sports. After starting school he expects to have little time to seek records.
He says his 300,000-beer-coaster building was his last and he thinks it could stand in the Guinness Book of World Records for a long time because, he says, he's never really had a competitor.
