France: Reporter legend Georg Stefan Troller is dead

He led about 2,000 interviews and made more than 170 films. Georg Stefan Troller made his “human touch”, which he was the first to introduce to German television, a reporter legend. Now the journalist, documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and writer at the age of 103, has died, as his daughter Fenn Troller announced in Paris.

Sensitive observer human fate

Troller was always about humans and their fates, whether known or unknown people, whether big or small life stories. In his reports, he went to the limits of journalistically possible: he approached the people he reported about, asked her without showing her, without her life without exposing her. An unmistakable style that made him the model of entire generations of journalists.

The “literary world”, in which Troller worked as a columnist until the end, mourns the loss of a “zeiten of the century”.

Origin and escape from the National Socialists

Troller was born on December 10, 1921 in Vienna in a Jewish family of fur traders. In 1938 his family fled to Czechoslovakia in front of the Nazis, then to France and from there to the USA.

In 1943 he was drafted into military service by the US Army, after the end of the Second World War he began to study theater studies before he came to the Sorbonne in Paris thanks to a scholarship in 1950. There he found his appointment as a cultural correspondent and television reporter.

TV career between Paris, Cologne and Mainz

In the 1960s, he began his career with the program “Paris Journal” on West German radio with celebrities and fewer prominent guests from the French capital. Later he continued with the ZDF series “Personal Description”, which set new standards on television with psychological portraits of people of different origins.