In memory of

Raimund’s home

The last CD by "Tschako" Jäger was recently presented at the Theater Kosmos in Bregenz. A memorable evening in which a true original was remembered in all his facets.

(Bild: Lisa Mathis)

The musician and writer Raimund "Tschako" Jäger passed away in December 2023. His last CD was recently presented at the Theater Kosmos in Bregenz. Author Robert Schneider was there for this special occasion.

Everyone had come who had liked him in some way, admired him, often not understood him, been enraged by him or simply shaken their heads. The auditorium in the Kosmos Theater in Bregenz was filled to capacity. Maria, his sister, hurried to present each guest with "The Box". The award, to use the beautiful old word, the last CD he completed shortly before his death. Exactly as he wanted it. To the letter. Without compromise. You could feel Maria's pain at the loss of her brother and long-time stage partner. She fleetingly pressed the legacy, hand-numbered in white pen and hidden in a black envelope, into my hand. And disappeared.

My first thought when I looked at "The Box" was: Do I still have a CD player at home? Yet it was yesterday when I invested all my money in CDs, at the end of the 80s. The feeling of how quickly the years have passed by, leaving us at a loss, stayed with us the whole evening. It's a strange feeling when you give in to the question of what remains. Nothing remains. There was no sentiment.

Raimund Jäger with his sister Maria.

(Bild: privat)

Raimund "Tschako" Jäger from Bregenz was a musician, journalist, writer - and much more.

(Bild: Lisa Mathis)

and much more.

(Bild: mathis.studio)

The musician and writer Raimund Tschako Jäger, who died on December 27, 2023 at the age of 62, "suffered and loved", as Charles Bukowski once put it so dryly in a profile about himself. Raimund, who surrounded himself with sarcasm and cynicism throughout his life, was in reality one of the most fragile and fragile contemporaries I have ever met. A fast thinker for whom slowness was anathema. When you spoke to him, you always had the impression that you couldn't surprise him with anything at all. "Seriously now: You don't want to know the answer to that." That was his standard phrase. What many people didn't realize was that when he talked, he listened. When he spoke, he understood his counterpart. A paradox. But he could do it.

As it was getting dark in the hall for the posthumous CD presentation, his long-time musical accompanist Markus Linder ("Tschako & Der kleine Prinz") took to the stage. He led through the evening. Even without sentiment, but with a wonderfully touching warmth. When Linder talked from the sewing box or led us to the respective program items, we felt embraced. Photos of Raimund were projected onto the wall, including one that showed him already marked by death. I thought that was powerful. He told me himself on the phone when he was already very ill: "Anyone who has smoked a million cigarettes in their life and lived like me shouldn't be surprised."

"Tschako & the Little Prince" alias Raimund Jäger and Markus Linder.

(Bild: Altes Kino)

His last CD reveals a man who basically never had an artistic home. Where he had arrived, he left the genre again, returning to it nolens volens, because a person simply has to live from something. He made folk music and chansons, and then again he didn't. He could sing, and then again he couldn't. He was a lyricist, writer, columnist and then again he wasn't. At the end of his life - "Das Kästchen" bears eloquent witness to this - music acted only as a foil, as a kind of distant feeling. The text became the measure of all things. The purring punch line. Poetry was never at his command. He knew that. Perhaps he longed for poetry, the numinous, that unrequited romanticism that drives every sarcastic all his life. To not have to think for once! Just to be for once, without justification.

Some of the song lyrics from back then seemed hopelessly out of date that evening. The punchlines were contrived, the thematization of sexuality virile and snore-inducing. And questionable for today's ears. No longer possible. But there was a flash of something brilliantly Kafkaesque in the short prose. A thoroughly wistful Raimund Jäger. Hubert Dragaschnig recited the posthumous story "Das Loch" with virtuoso economy. An enchantingly sad short story with many false bottoms, it tells of how Lake Constance disappeared one day without a trace and the narrator can only look down into an immeasurably deep, black hole. The text ends with the words that the first-person narrator no longer wants to stay in Bregenz. He wants to leave. He has never left Bregenz again. He knew too well that wherever you flee, you always take yourself with you.

It wouldn't have been an evening to his taste if there hadn't been a little provocation. At the end, "Fräulein Jäger", who lost her guiding spirit far too early, sang Lale Andersen's "Lili Marlen", the classic German soldier's song. The endurance song. There were those who turned up their noses and protested afterwards, albeit behind closed doors.

What remains? For me, the memory of a person I admired but never envied. And there is one image that I will certainly never forget. On the cold winter morning when Raimund was buried, as we all stood at his grave, Maria took a recorder out of her jacket pocket and played a lullaby for her beloved brother. I have never heard a more heartbreaking farewell in my life.

Where is he now? In the eternal hunting grounds, as befits a hunter. No calendar sayings, please. He would say: "Seriously now: You don't want to know the answer to that."