Georg Stefan Troller: Reporter legend is dead

Paris. He has conducted approximately 2,000 interviews and made more than 170 films. His "human touch," which he was the first to introduce to German television, made Georg Stefan Troller a reporting legend.

Now the journalist, documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and author has died at the age of 103, as his daughter Fenn Troller announced in Paris.

Troller was always about people and their fates, whether well-known or unknown, whether big or small life stories.

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In his reports, he pushed the boundaries of journalistic possibility: He approached the people he reported on, questioned them without embarrassing them, and entered their lives without exposing them. A distinctive style that made him a role model for entire generations of journalists.

The “Literary World”, where Troller worked as a columnist until his death, mourns the loss of a “witness of the century”.

Troller was born on December 10, 1921, in Vienna into a Jewish fur trader family. In 1938, his family fled the Nazis, first to Czechoslovakia, then to France, and from there to the United States.

In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army for military service. After the end of World War II, he began studying theater studies there before receiving a scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. There, he found his calling as a cultural correspondent and television reporter.

He began his career in the 1960s with the program “Pariser Journal” on Westdeutscher Rundfunk, featuring prominent and less prominent guests from the French capital.

He later continued this with the ZDF series “Personenbeschreibung,” which set new standards in television with psychological portraits of people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

RND/dpa