When lawyer Jacob Stickelberger took over the defense of Federal Councilor’s husband Hans W. Kopp, Switzerland was outraged. Wasn’t that Mani Matter’s close confidant? Yet. But not only.
Jacob Stickelberger struggled with the fact that he always needed so many words for his stories and songs. Too complicated, he complained. «That’s good. The muesch la sii. You’re baroque,” Mani Matter comforted him.
They called him Gandhi in the scouts, Mr. Attorney at work, and his record covers say chansonnier. The musician Jacob Stickelberger has written more than a hundred songs. He was part of the Bernese troubadours, which once included Mani Matter. However, he was only a Berner by dialect.
The father, a pastor, was from Basel. The family first lived in Basel and later in Lucerne. Stickelberger came to Bern to study law, but then immediately moved on to Zurich for an internship – where he stayed because of love. When asked how he actually came to sing in Bern German, he explained: “My mother was from Bern. And you are always what your mother was.”
Whenever Stickelberger appeared, be it on stage together with the Bernese troubadours or in the courtroom, for example as the defense attorney for Hans W. Kopp, he did so calmly and deliberately. Here with mischief, there with consistency and sometimes vice versa. He never put himself in the spotlight. Whenever someone dragged him into the center, he cut a good figure there, but he preferred to shape Switzerland from the second row. Stickelberger caused a national uproar twice.
Stickelberger’s scandals
In 1979, German-speaking Switzerland thought what Stickelberger was doing was unheard of. You knew the name and the face. Wasn’t that one of the closest confidants of Mani Matter, who died in 1972? The man who had sung “D Kriminalgschicht” in a duet with Fritz Widmer, a kind of two-man operetta in Bern German, in which Matter had also taken part before his death.
Anyone who hadn’t heard him before knew him at least since the SRF production by Franz Hohler, which was intended to pay tribute to Matter’s work. Pretty and smiling, Stickelberger sat there between his singing partner Widmer and the writer Hohler. The words he found for his deceased companion were loving, also considered, and the look mischievous when he sang.
And now this! In 1979, the Bernese singer-songwriter Tinu Heiniger called the music of the Dübendorf brothers Trio Eugster “Entertainment Brunz” in a song. “Oh läck du mir” was the exclamation in Zurich and without further ado Stickelberger was hired. He should ensure that Heiniger’s song is banned. And because Stickelberger was good at what he did, Heiniger was no longer allowed to sing about Eugster’s “Unterhaltungsbrunz” from then on.
The small excitement was followed ten years later by Hans W. Kopp, who introduced the man who was to defend him in court: Jacob Stickelberger, a family friend. If the scandal surrounding former Federal Councilor Elisabeth Kopp hadn’t been big enough, lawyer Stickelberger would have made it perfect. But it was enough like this: Stickelberger fan clubs broke up and the postman brought envelopes with pieces of broken records. But Stickelberger, who often wore a knotted cord instead of a normal tie – a bolo tie or cowboy tie – was undeterred. He continued, with the law and with the music.
«Growing old is a sickness»
“Growing old is a sickness,” said Stickelberger in 2018 in a conversation with the “Bund”. In the same year he played his last concert in Bern’s Mahogany Hall – and published his first book, the history of his family, with the Zytglogge publishing house.
Even if his hands on the guitar didn’t really want to participate anymore, Stickelberger never forgot how to tell a story. Although Stickelberger himself would probably say he never really learned it. Because it always sounded a little more complicated with him than with the other troubadours. “The main characters in his songs often have to force their way through a true labyrinth of thoughts or actions before things come to a bad end,” Franz Hohler once said.
Shortly before Christmas, at the age of 82, the life story of the lawyer, who was a chansonnier, the Berner from Basel, who spent almost his whole life in Zurich, also came to an end.