sweet & bitter

Lify Bucher, granddaughter of the Inner Swiss hotel king Bucher-Durrer and connected to the chocolate clan Lindt & Sprüngli, was born in 1899 and died in 1999. She grows up in her parents' grand hotel by the Mediterranean, is driven away as a young girl by mercenaries from Italy, and acquires the skills for navigating the marriage market at a boarding school in Neuchâtel. However, things do not go as planned. Although she meets the man of her dreams in Zurich, reason dictates a different choice. The failure of her marriage and the collapse of the Bucher hotel empire force her to stand on her own two feet. The two world wars, the stock market crash, the economic boom of the sixties, and the emancipation of the seventies shape her life and that of her daughter, the author Silvana Schmid. With "sweet & bitter," she presents a very personal chronicle of the 20th century.