Reporter legend Georg Stefan Troller is dead

Georg Stefan Troller entered the Cologne Literature House in February 2020, surprisingly upright, only slightly stooped. Wearing a pink-striped shirt, a colorful jacket, and a slightly daring hairstyle.

The 98-year-old had come to the reading that evening, shortly before the coronavirus lockdown: biographical details, anecdotes from his time in Paris, and historical events he experienced as a Jewish emigrant and US soldier in devastated Germany in 1945. These preoccupied him his entire life. As he began reading, with a slight Viennese accent, the room fell silent.

Troller's childhood in Jewish Vienna

Georg Stefan Troller was born on December 10, 1921, in Vienna, the son of a fur trader family. He had a tough time as a Jewish boy; he was teased on the streets and ridiculed by his schoolmates.

"You had to live with that kind of thing. And it got even harder under the Nazis," he reported. Education was the answer. His father forced him to read all the classics.

At 16, he borrowed an old typewriter and hammered out his own poems and thoughts: "Georg Stefan Troller's Collected Works" was written on the cover.

Shortly thereafter, his emigration odyssey began. In 1938, he managed to escape the Nazis from occupied Vienna: "Crossing the border at night with a smuggler, and from then on, everything was illegal, without papers."

His journey continued through what was then Czechoslovakia and France. With a great deal of luck, he was able to obtain a visa to the USA in Marseille. In 1941, Georg Stefan Troller arrived in the promised land of America.

Return to Europe as a US soldier

In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army for military service. As the Allied troops advanced through occupied France and Nazi Germany, he rendered valuable service to the Americans with his knowledge of German. He was familiar with the mentality of fellow travelers and Nazi perpetrators and was therefore deployed to interrogate German prisoners of war.

As an emigrated Viennese Jew, no one could fool him. "I never heard the word liberation back then," Troller said in many interviews.

"Something like freedom and democracy was completely out of the German mindset. They all admired our military equipment, the jeeps, the walkie-talkies. It's no wonder you won the war with that equipment, I was told," he said in a 2005 TV interview with Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

On May 1, 1945, US soldier Troller drove a jeep into the Dachau concentration camp, which had been liberated by US troops . He was supposed to interrogate SS prisoners there. Only with the distanced view through the camera could he bear the horrific sight of the many starving, murdered prisoners—a harrowing experience for him.

Beginnings as a reporter

Troller began working as a reporter, first at Radio Munich , then at the Neue Zeitung . But nothing was keeping him in Munich; he wanted to return to Vienna, his hometown.

"Back then, I walked all the streets I knew, for days and nights, to quell my homesickness. But finally, I found this saying for myself: You can't find a homeland any more than you can find a childhood."

Troller returned to the USA, studied theater, and, thanks to a scholarship, landed in Paris in 1950. The Sorbonne University, the vibrant city on the Seine, the spirit of French women—all of this was a new world for him.

Legendary interviews with Parisian celebrities

He developed into a flâneur, a discerning observer of the French art of living. "Paris opened my eyes and taught me so much. It was a big-city life, unlike the small-town narrow-mindedness that one found everywhere in Germany," he recounted in his memoirs ("Self-Descriptions," 2009).

In Paris, Georg Stefan Troller also found his calling as a television reporter in the early 1960s. For nine years, he worked as a cultural correspondent for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, producing the program "Pariser Journal ," insightful studies of social circles and portraits of people who revealed a Paris previously unknown in Germany.

In 1971, ZDF (Second German Television) recruited him. He made television history with his interview format "Personenbeschreibung" (Personal Description ) – groundbreaking, bold, and with unconventional questions. Stars like Marlon Brando, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Woody Allen, Kirk Douglas, Romy Schneider, and boxing legend Mohammed Ali answered his questions.

Journalism as therapy

"Being a journalist was a means of self-healing and life-saving for me," Troller recalled. He not only conducted interviews, but also made television films and documentaries, and wrote books and essays for magazines.

Photography also fascinated him. Throughout his life, he attentively recorded what surrounded him, observed, questioned, and shared his experiences, stories, and interviews with a wide audience.

Now the witness of the century, who wrote, narrated, and reported well into old age, has died in Paris. He was 103 years old.