France: Legend of television: Georg Stefan Troller is dead

He spoke to Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman and Konrad Adenauer. Likewise, with a cross-sectional Vietnam veteran, which had the courage to be filmed naked in the bathtub in his vulnerability. Georg Stefan Troller led around 2,000 interviews and created more than 170 films about people and their large and small life stories. Now the Austrian and US Citizens of Jewish origin at the age of 103, as his daughter Fenn Troller announced in Paris.

A pioneer of television

Troller was one of the most important television journalists, screenwriters, directors and documentary filmmakers of the German post -war period. As early as the 1960s, he asked questions with celebrities of the French cultural scene that were anything but usual, such as: “Are you happy with your life?”

This blunt, cheeky directness was new and outrageous. Trollers answered world -famous stars personally and often touchingly open – far beyond what could otherwise be seen in the flash of lightning.

With his distinctive style and the “human touch”, which he was the first to bring to television, he became a legend of German journalism – and the model of entire generations.

In a long interview on his 100th birthday, he told Bayerischer Rundfunk that he wanted to “immerse yourself” in people to understand how they became what they are. He described himself as a “man -eating” – a self -description for his insatiable curiosity to trace the life and fate of other people.

Subjectivity as a principle

He always looked for a subjective access to them, sometimes in a steadfast or mocking way. The actress Lauren Hutton asked why she never had her teeth straightened. The American was once one of the best paid supermodels in the world with her gaps in the tooth gaps.

His emphasized subjective survey method was initially criticized. After the end of the Second World War, the documentation had to meet the requirement of objectivity.

“My expression could adapt to that, but behind it the subjectivism lurked,” he said in the interview. This mix was his style. He couldn’t describe stories objectively, because basically he is a poet – and where are there poetists who do not start with “I”.

Success with “Paris Journal” and “Personal description”

Troller made the personal view of things into the main stimulus of its multi-award-winning programs, such as the “Paris Journal” on West German Radio (WDR), with prominent guests from the French metropolis, and the ZDF series “Personal Description” with psychological portraits of people from many countries and a wide variety of history.

His portraits ranged from A as the boxer Muhammad Ali to K for K like Edmond Kaiser, founder of the children’s aid work “Terre des Hommes”, who showed him the misery of the leprosy tank in India, until Z like Elmo Zumwalt, who was jointly responsible for the spraying of sluggening in the Vietnam War.

Troller was born on December 10, 1921 in Vienna in a Jewish family of fur traders. In 1938 the family fled to Czechoslovakia in front of the Nazis, then to France and America. In 1943 he was confiscated by the US Army for military service, in April 1945 he was involved in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Because of his knowledge of German, he was commissioned by the Americans to hear prisoners of war.

After the end of the Second World War, he began to study English and theater in the USA before he came to Sorbonne in Paris. There he found his appointment as a cultural correspondent and television reporter. Troller lived in France for over 70 years; His second wife died in 2018 and was buried in Paris.

Troller’s eldest daughter Fenn Troller remembered a childhood “in a cosmopolitan environment” in which they surrounded “of words, languages, books and versatile works of art”. “Our life was shaped by filming, meeting with family and friends from all over the world as well as vacation in our stone house in Normandy surrounded by a moat.” Her random discovery of photos that her father took in the 1950s made it possible for him to publish his memory book “A Dream of Paris” and to be recognized as a great photographer at the end of his life.

Work as a survival strategy

According to his own statement, Troller’s main drive force was overcoming his natural, increased fear of passage through flight and persecution. By asking selected people the questions he had, he expanded his own horizon of experience as a person and filmmaker.

He once needed his work to survive, he once said. He called his strength to find questions that he asked others. For Troller, interviews were ultimately self -discussions.

In an interview with the platform for the Franco-German dialogue “Dokdoc.eu”, Troller pulled his life of life: “I became a predetermined for which I was predetermined,” he replied. And he added: “What I dreamed of was true.”