Soldier and embroiderer

Marie-Therese Guggisberg is no showgirl - and certainly not a TV darling. She comes across as too aloof, almost brittle. When she gave up her job as a presenter on Swiss television after just one year, she said: "I don't feel challenged enough as a journalist. Presenting has become just announcing."

Marie-Therese Guggisberg is born in Laufenburg (AG). She teaches for several years and marries the Aarau music teacher and composer Fritz Guggisberg. When he dies in 1980, the couple are already separated. She kept his name.

In addition to her first steps in journalism, Guggisberg studied at the University of Zurich and completed her doctorate with a thesis on foreign reporting in the newspapers of small neutral states. She works for radio and then switches to television, where she is the female face of Tagesschau for a year.

She is already a mature woman when she completes the FHD recruit school in Kreuzlingen. An affinity for the military remained with her for the rest of her life. Contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist at SRG, she sometimes appears in uniform at Leutschenbach. Of course, anyone who has anything to do with her realizes that this woman with a dashing appearance has a delicate sensibility and is in need of harmony.

Back on the radio, she achieved the almost impossible in the Zurich radio studio at the beginning of the 1980s. It was a time of youth unrest. In 1982, in a heated atmosphere, a new head of the information desk at the Zurich radio studio was to be appointed. Balz Hosang is proposed. The middle-class members of the regional sponsorship organization (Radio and Television Cooperative Zurich RFZ) are up in arms against this. At a turbulent meeting, they prevent Hosang's election. Guggisberg subsequently manages - first ad interim, then officially as head - to pacify the Zurich radio dispute.

In 1987, Guggisberg moved to the Federal Military Department in Bern - as Head of the Information Service of the General Staff Services Group. The FHD woman is also a competent advisor to Chief of Staff Eugen Lüthy. However, the chemistry with his successor is not right. Guggisberg gratefully accepts the offer from SBB Director General Hans Eisenring and moves to the Federal Railways.

Guggisberg spent the last ten years of her professional life as Head of Communications at Rentenanstalt. She retires in 2003. Her work colleagues give her an embroidery kit "so that she has something to do". The newly retired woman sits down in the bay window of her apartment and starts embroidering - and her ambition leads her to mastery. She calls her embroidery method "strategic embroidery": "It's about determining how to embroider the patterns and colors without sewing the thread and putting it back on elsewhere. At the same time, there must be no have threads. It is important to only make half crosses and to complete them - on the way back - so that you arrive back at the starting point and can continue embroidering there." The result of this strategic embroidery: the back is a perfect reflection of the front. The highest art of embroidery. Marie-Therese Guggisberg spent hours, days and nights over her embroidery work in the last years of her life. (NZZ am Sonntag)