By Siegfried Weischenberg
He discovered that he was ›born‹ to be a journalist only late in life, after an adventurous youth which had been forced upon the Viennese Jew by the vicissitudes of time. He became a ›media legend‹ primarily through his portraits of people he discovered on the streets of Paris. Georg Stefan Troller, who developed his own style of radio and later television interviewing, died there at the age of 103.
The ›flâneur‹ is, as a historical figure, a Parisian invention, so to speak. It is associated with the common perception of a person who wanders aimlessly through the streets and, in particular, the many passages of the French capital, looking here and there, without any particular intentions and, in fact, without any ambition to pick up more than a few random impressions (cf. Mönninger 2004: 73f.). But this underestimates him (as ›flâneur‹ generally refers to men) and ignores his possible intentions, namely to get to know a big city and its inhabitants without any pressure of space or time and to discover things that are hidden from the hurried passerby. »The flâneur is the ultimate inhabitant of the passages, analyzing the city and its inhabitants,« says an essay that identifies Walter Benjamin as the social and cultural scholar who discovered this figure and emphasizes that, in his description of flânerie as an art form, Benjamin mentioned not only the detective but also the journalist (Hartmann 2006: 299). He writes: »The journalist behaves as a flâneur, as if he too knew this.« Benjamin goes on to say that he »makes it his business to make leisure hours on the boulevard appear as part of it [working time].« (Benjamin 1991: 559)
From a German perspective, no one recognized the opportunity to explore the Parisian world as a journalistic ›flâneur‹ with the help of portraits of individuals as well as Georg Stefan Troller. He pursued his calling as an observer of people and discoverer of their secrets until a very advanced age, and then knew how to translate this into an extremely successful television format. As he repeatedly emphasized, his primary focus was always on finding out something about himself; he presented his memories as a Self-description [Selbstbeschreibung]. In the expanded new edition, published two decades later, he described what made his »personal journalism« distinctive in very drastic terms as »cannibalism,« in which »we feed on the warm blood of our prey in order to strengthen ourselves«. This, he said, was »the psychological process, whatever protective cloak we may drape over it: that of enlightenment, compassion, or even social reportage« (Troller 2009: 343).
The French capital Paris had only reluctantly become his second home after the Second World War for the then twenty-something; he actually wanted to return to the Austrian capital of Vienna, where he was born as the second son of a Jewish fur trader from Brno. »Whether in Berlin, Paris, or New York, I will never be able to feel anything other than Viennese,« he confesses at the very beginning of his autobiography. But: »Like all Viennese, I have always loved Vienna as passionately as I have hated it, which is undoubtedly fruitful. The city I had to leave at the age of seventeen never left me indifferent.«[1] After three years as a »traveling fan« in the US Army, which fought its way from Italy to France and then to defeated Germany with him as a »Private Troller« (»without having fired a shot«), he follows in the footsteps of his idol B. Traven. Traveling Latin America without funds, he met a former dermatologist who also came from his father’s homeland, and then reported in his memoirs: »Brno may be a small town, but it is full of geniuses.« He gives two examples – and this is not atypical of Troller’s fundamentally ironic narrative style: »One was a Neapolitan folk singer in London. Another was a cowboy in Wyoming.« And this chance acquaintance now works as a ›hygiene inspector‹ in Guatemala.
Karl Troller, the father, fails in his attempt to turn his son into a fur trader – and later again when both are living in exile in the USA. At least the son, as a little poet, had written the German-language rhyme on the back of his father’s business card: »If you don’t buy Troller furs, you’ll freeze to death on the spot.« For those sorts of things, the family loved their youngest one. The talented boy is praised by his parents and »tenderly pinched on the cheek by his various aunts […] the prerequisite for so many Jewish success stories,« writes the later famous television personality. However, his relatives thought he looked »pronouncedly« Jewish – and this at a time when the highest praise the Viennese could bestow was, »He doesn’t look like a Jew.«
But the stupid talk soon turned bitterly serious in Austria. The adolescent had just become a ›Krausian‹, wanting to become an artist like Karl Kraus, when the Austrians hung on the lips of their compatriot Adolf Hitler and cheered him on at the Ring and Heldenplatz by the hundreds of thousands, and even the poets ran over to the ›Third Reich‹ with »their suspenders flying.« And he hears the chant on the radio: »Dear Führer, be so kind and show yourself at the window!« Now he realizes what separates him from the ›Aryans.‹ It was not religion or race: »What made me different was simply that, for some unfathomable reason, I could not speak this language. This voluptuous, servile bootlicking, kowtowing, parrying, hypocrisy, adulation, zeal, positivity, conformity, wanting to be part of it, having to go along, marching along, shouting along, punishing along, murdering along […]« It contained everything that ultimately led to catastrophe. »In Leopoldstraße, the ghetto of the poorer Jews, the golden heart of Vienna raged,« he reports. »The agitation turned into a hunt, as Karl Kraus had already noted,« he says. Then, with the annexation of Austria by the German Reich, his whole life changed abruptly . »It was March 11, 1938, the end of my childhood,« he notes laconically.
Soon, he and his family are faced with the question whether or not to leave the Greater German Reich. First, they go to relatives in Brno (Troller with only one book in his luggage – Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind), and then soon on to Paris. But the French capital also proved to be a difficult place to live. Soon after the war began, father and son were interned. When a ceasefire was declared after the German invasion, they were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. But the family managed to flee to the south of France. Father and mother later escaped via Portugal; they were among the last to succeed in fleeing Europe. The son also managed to obtain a visa for the USA in Marseille. His chances of doing so were actually slim, as he was not one of the people eligible for the ›artist emergency visa‹ arranged by Varian Fry, which saved the lives of many well-known German writers and journalists (cf. Wittstock 2024). But once again, Georg Stefan Troller was helped by luck and his father’s personal contacts. In addition, the vice-consul in charge was of the opinion that »America needs soldiers.« He had previously asked him if he was a communist. »›Yes, yes!‹ I shouted enthusiastically, because I didn’t understand a word. The vice-consul possessed the most beautiful of all virtues: humor. He laughed and stamped the paradise paper, adding the date: May 12, 1941.« (Troller 1988: 126f.)
It took him more than two months to reach New York, after being »stranded: in Casablanca on a coffin ship called Wyoming – where neither Humphrey Bogart nor Ingrid Bergman were waiting at Rick’s Café. After a forced stay in a hut camp run by the Foreign Legion, he finally continued his journey on another ship. At the port, Troller was greeted by a swarm of reporters, who were only interested in celebrities such as Albert Einstein or Arturo Toscanini, or alternatively Golo Mann, the son of the Nobel Prize winner for literature, and Heinrich, his brother. He quickly finds a job, but then ends up in hospital because he contracted paratyphoid fever in Morocco. At least there are »a few white-clad carbolic girls« there, he reports.
Now he makes the acquaintance of emigrants who were big names in Germany but have to settle for much less here professionally. Of course, there are also impostors among them, who are exposed with the following anecdote: »Two dachshunds meet on Amsterdam Avenue. One says to the other: ›You know, over in Europe I was a St. Bernard.‹« He now tries his luck along these lines at the famous exile newspaper Aufbau, which prefers to print essays by famous German-speaking authors such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, Werfel, Mehring, Kesten, and Polgar. But since he had »never hatched a line of journalism,« he was turned away by the bouncer. An attempt at the afternoon paper PM, the favorite newspaper of New York intellectuals, also fails, he ends up working as a »bookbinder at the machine […] roughly the shabbiest job New York had to offer.« The 20-year-old did not see himself as an exile and claimed that he never used the word: »Far too highbrow a term for our undignified expulsion,« he said. Unlike well-known figures such as Bertolt Brecht, people like him felt that expulsion was something final and irrevocable, »without it helping us much in finding our identity.« On the one hand, he feels that he should actually be »bursting with bliss« at being »saved and in the USA.« On the other hand, however, he feels alienated in the New World, where »something like the totalitarianism of conformity« prevails.
At this point, he only wants to learn a little English to earn a living. Like the other emigrants with Jewish roots, he confesses: »My language remained German.« The German of Karl Kraus’s Last Days – which he had internalized so thoroughly that he lost his few friends »out of sheer verbal aggression.« »After that, I put Kraus aside for years,« he reports, »and became almost a tolerable person!« He openly admits: »I can’t remember being very concerned about the fate of European Jewry in New York.« Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack on the American Pacific Fleet stationed in Hawaii, changed everything for Georg Stefan Troller – three days before his twentieth birthday. This relieved him of long-delayed decisions that affected his future life: »The most convenient solution and one of the reasons for the universal popularity of wars,« he soberly notes. The young man is certain »that the US Army could not do without me in the long run.«
But another year passes before he is drafted. After learning the basics of warfare from one of the typical drill sergeants and proving himself in kitchen duty, he is still not sent to the front. What is going on? He is mistrusted because he jokingly told a comrade that he was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler; this is now on file. Once that was cleared up, a colonel declared him »fit for overseas service« – and he first went ashore in Casablanca, which he knew well from his journey into exile. But: »I had left the old world as Kafka’s dung beetle, and I returned as Gary Cooper.« His »highly personal reconquest« had begun. In the US Army, he first learns what role Black people are allowed to play here. They are generally only employed as cooks, drivers, and supply personnel because, as he ironically notes, »America sees them as born service providers.«
Soon he is off to Italy, arriving in Naples, where Troller finds himself in a situation with long-term consequences: thanks to his language skills, he is assigned to the team that interrogates German and Austrian prisoners of war in the ›Prisoner Cage.‹ Here he learns how to get information out of people who want to hide something. »›Come on, spill it, man,‹ I say, and he unflinchingly gives me everything he has inside him.« With some experience, Troller finds out which method is the most successful. »This ›interview technique,‹ based on the empathetic, perhaps more feminine part of my nature, will serve me well,« he writes in retrospect. In the process, he also learns how well the reduction of cognitive dissonance already works among the defeated enemies: »There are no Nazis. There are no concentration camps. There is no SA, no SS, no Gestapo, and no party with ranks and divisions. It’s all nonsense.« Such ignorance outrages Troller, a Jew who was forced to leave his home: »I feel cheated of my hatred.« What he experienced was »not only embarrassing for the Krauts,« he thinks, »but also for me« – since he learned that he was dealing with ›compliant sycophants.‹ After months of fighting, the American army finally achieves a breakthrough at Monte Cassino in the spring of 1944, at about the same time as the invasion of Normandy. Gradually, the end of World War II is in sight, even though the German army continues to fight fiercely. Troller now lands in France and first conquers the beach at Saint Tropez, where this time no one asks him for a stamp or visa, as he notes with relief. In the meantime, his »feel for language« has changed: »I don’t need your damn language anymore,« he writes to the Germans, »or only for domestic use, to finish you off,« he adds. »For I belong to the language of the victors! Yes, that’s it. American triumphs over German, that will be the net gain of the war. This smooth, democratic monosyllabic language over your brittle, twisted, and mendacious idiom.«
Then he continues north at »blitzkrieg speed,« where, as always, women line his path. So it is not only Strasbourg that is being conquered. And then he also conquers a Leica camera that a sleeping German private is wearing around his neck. This makes Georg Stefan Troller a man of images who, as always, ironically admits: »Like many soldiers, when not directly involved in dying, I loved war. War is the continuation of youth by other means.« He sends the newspaper PM a short story about a reconnaissance unit he led, for which he receives a check. But the paper closes down before the story appears: »That delayed my first printing experience by unbearable months[…]« Despite the camera he snatched from the enemy, it is too late for a career as a war photographer. But Troller travels around taking rather abstract-looking pictures of the aftermath of the war, such as »twisted railroad tracks.« He is unable to secure a job as a news cameraman, but at least he gets one as an interpreter for an American newsreel team. This even earns him a brief appearance in a documentary film.
By chance, he meets the school janitor from his high school days in Vienna, who, a Nazi through and through, had bullied one of his teachers at the time. In return, he now makes him clean a filthy toilet. Once again, during an interrogation, he experiences how willingly informants in the last days of the war reveal what they know about their actions. »That was the flip side of German supremacism,« he concludes. »The pedantry of a job well done became an end in itself.« This is how he explains »the lack of remorse shown by so many accountable leaders.« Specifically, he names generals, party bosses, industrialists, lawyers, and doctors, »right down to the Barbies and Eichmanns.« His list is completed by journalists. When he then carelessly attempts to cross the Rhine in a rubber dinghy as part of an advance guard near Worms, he is drawn into the war after all. He is shot at from the other bank. »At me! Even though I wasn’t involved in the war at all, just an innocent spectator!«
Twenty years after the publication of his autobiography, a journalist asks him the cunning question of whether, without the hard lessons he had learned and now come to terms with, he would have become »just an unremarkable, run-of-the-mill journalist.« Troller responds very seriously and elaborates: »It was always about the fact that emigration means a loss of identity. That after years of losing your identity and being driven around, you no longer know who you are, what you are entitled to in this world. The feeling of not being entitled to anything … Fear of life, isolation, withdrawal – that was the totally negative prerequisite for what I later became. Because I had to fill this tremendous emptiness, this lack of self-esteem, somehow.« (Mischke 2009)
Now in his mid-twenties, Troller wants nothing more to do with the difficult business of ›denazification‹ and joins Radio Munich, »where I became founding member number seven of what would later become Bayerischer Rundfunk, just like Hitler was for the German Workers’ Party.« He gets the job because he can answer the trick question about the name of the American vice president during the job interview. The ›re-education of the Germans,‹ the major Allied project of those days, was limited to short political commentaries, reports the journalistic newcomer. He dislikes the fact that Radio Munich is quickly turning into a popular entertainment station »with music and hullabaloo;« so he looks for a more sophisticated alternative. He finds it at the Neue Zeitung in Schellingstraße, in Munich’s district Schwabing, where the former printing site of the Völkischer Beobachter had been located. He actually wanted to join the arts section with the famous writer Erich Kästner, but at that time only »savvy writers« were accepted. So he remained a reporter, »a job for which I was ill-suited due to my lack of precise observational skills,« he admits, hiding his light under a bushel. However, he did not stay at the renowned newspaper for very long. Although he actually had everything he needed, he waited for what he called »a call.« Like many ex-emigrants, he now missed the »satisfying feeling of homecoming. Of return. Of a new beginning, no, of rebirth.« Even more ambitious: »In principle, a new Troller had to emerge from the new Germany.« So he takes a month’s vacation and hitchhikes with a friend to the place where he never wanted to be again: his hometown of Vienna, which is then controlled by the Soviets. But in Austria, he falls into »a bottomless hole of regression.« In Vienna, he finds St. Stephen’s Cathedral burned out, as well as the opera house and the Burgtheater. In search of lost time, he roams the city, visiting the places of his youth.
Now he settles scores with his old homeland, listing compatriots who »were vastly overrepresented in the Nazi party. Also in the SS. Also in the Gestapo. And among the Gauleiters and Reich Commissioners.« People like Kaltenbrunner and Höß, the commander of Auschwitz, as well as Seidl, the commander of Theresienstadt, and Brunner, who had sent the last Viennese Jews there. Finally, »the Austrian by choice, Eichmann, who had crafted the ›final solution of the Jewish question.‹« Troller finds the formula for what had happened: »The Germans, it was said, became anti-Semites because they were Nazis. With the Austrians, it was the other way around.« Now he notes that people are trying to sweep it all under the rug: »A coalition of silence.« It worked for decades. Soon he returns to Munich to the Neue Zeitung, whose editor-in-chief Hans Wallenberg deserves credit for discovering Troller. Wallenberg wanted him to write ›personality stories‹ because he recognized this as his young colleague’s particular strength. Troller remained in this genre for his entire journalistic career. »I reported on every person as if they were a character in a play or film. They ›fit,‹ they ›worked out,‹« he writes in retrospect. »My interviews took the form of dialogues, my reports were screenplays.« He adds confidently: »I didn’t care much whether the people involved recognized themselves in them.«
But soon he interrupts his promising journalistic career and returns to the US, initially for the purpose of being discharged from military service. Now his father, who has remained in New York, presents him with his old favorite idea for his son’s future: to try his luck in the fur industry (or alternatively in »ready-to-wear clothing«). Georg Stefan Troller quickly took off and invested the $10,000 he was entitled to as a war veteran in a college education in faraway California. While hitchhiking west, he was once picked up by movie star Hedy Lamarr, who was considered the most beautiful woman in the world at the time. Of course, he knew that she had become famous for her nude appearance in the silent film Ecstasy, but he actually knew her from Vienna, when she had still been called Kiesler. He begged her for three autographs, which he was able to exchange for one from his idol, the Austrian soccer god Matthias Sindelar. She, however, no longer wanted to be reminded of those years: »Film stars had no past back then, certainly not a Jewish one!« Troller now experiences a completely different, easier life, and he loves »this hedonistic fool’s paradise.« He has long since abandoned his post-war plan to become a completely new person and now follows the mantra »Be who you are.« In the Californian sun, his goal is to »let himself live« – preferably with movie starlets, who, of course, turn out to be waitresses. The only thing missing for his complete bliss is an open convertible. That’s what Troller dreams of after all the traumas of the past years.
He eagerly soaks up the knowledge that the liberal arts have to offer, enjoys life, and then moves north to Berkeley University in San Francisco. He gets there by Greyhound bus via Carmel, which many years later became famous thanks to its mayor, Clint Eastwood. On the way there, he hardly notices the beautiful landscape because he is reading Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzky March. »An author,« he admits, »whom I could easily have encountered in Vienna, Prague, and later in Paris, but about whom I knew nothing else.« After graduating, he sets off for the south with almost no money (80 dollars), a trip that Troller describes almost in the form of a road movie. He prepared himself by taking a university seminar on D. H. Lawrence, which paid off when he later met Lawrence’s colorful widow Frieda, née von Richthofen, in New Mexico and experienced her in all her quirkiness. And by studying the legendary author B. Traven, whose book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was currently being filmed in Mexico by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart in the lead role. He wants to track Traven down because he is supposedly involved in the film project as a consultant. But he soon gives up the hunt for his idol because he realizes: »I was not a ›gifted researcher‹ like Gerd Heidemann, the Traven researcher for stern-magazine (and inventor of its Hitler diaries).« Years later, he visits Traven’s widow in Mexico City. This time, he continues on to Guatemala, where a false friend steals his Leica and all his films. But he quickly comes to see this loss as a relief, because now he can truly open his eyes to his travel adventure and is no longer inhibited by the mania of »photographing everything to prove my cosmopolitanism, not forgetting depth of field and parallax.«
Now he can give free rein to his urge to explore the world as a flâneur. But this journey is also a trip of self-discovery; he has to admit to himself that so far he has only really managed to survive. He realizes that, unlike the adventure heroes he admires, he lacks the courage to do the unconditional. »I only gave guest performances,« he admits to himself, »played roles.« And then come the decisive sentences that foreshadow the rest of his life: »What I never wanted to become turned out to be my main talent. I was born to be a journalist. And I could only hope to combine this profession with something that would satisfy my wandering desires and imaginations.« This hope was soon fulfilled. First, he, who had no papers other than his student ID, had to get out of Guatemala. He made up a story and managed to get the »straightforward US consul« in the capital to stamp a paper for his departure and lend him twenty dollars, »against the sacred promise to pay it back immediately. I had every intention of doing so, and I still do today,« he stresses. Back in New York, he learns that there is now a Fulbright scholarship that allows him to study comfortably in England or France. He applies for Paris, »but basically I wanted to go somewhere else.« Namely, to his hometown of Vienna, »because I obviously hadn’t had enough of that city yet.« He puts forward a philosophical reason for this, so to speak: »It is always the unlived and the unloved that entices us most.«
In Southampton, he sees his older brother Herbert again after many years, who had survived the Nazi era in England. Of course, the younger brother has a lot to report. »I tell exaggerated anecdotes from my current biography, which he laughs at, slightly absent-minded.« Only sometimes did his brother complain that what he was selling him as the truth couldn’t be entirely true. His reaction: »That upsets me, because I’m not going to let myself be pinned down by idiotic details.« After all, he had kept a diary since his days as a soldier on the front, as he revealed many years later in an interview. Such notes, which the US soldier wrote in German, were strictly forbidden at the time because of the danger of betraying secrets. Finally, the Fulbright scholarship is approved – not for Vienna, but for Paris. There is mo point in arguing. This changes everything – fortunately for him – also because he still basically views the Austrians as the worst, in any case unteachable and unconvertible Nazis.
At the Sorbonne in Paris, he quickly finds a doctoral supervisor. The only catch: the German studies professor expects a dissertation of 1,000 pages and a »short thesis« of about 300 pages. This ought to take three to four years. Troller calculates that he will be over 30 by the time he submits the manuscript, which no one will ever read anyway. »After that, I never set foot in the Sorbonne again.« The university only gets a hold of him when he secures the scholarship dollars. Now he devotes himself entirely to journalism and women – including those who stroll between the Opera and the Madeleine. »Soon I knew the whole Left Bank without anyone knowing me: a fence-sitter in Paris.« The »being recognized« would later change; what now becomes and remains truly virulent is the »flâneur Troller.« It all began with the medium of radio and the popular US program Answer Men, which he was tasked with adapting for Austrian listeners. They were to submit all kinds of questions, which were then answered on the microphone. So much for the theory. In practice, virtually none of the real questions made it into the program, Troller reports. »The real questions dealt entirely with the eternal themes of money, love, and hair loss,« he adds. In addition, there were fictional questions about brand-name products to satisfy the interests of the sponsors. That’s not a winner in the long run. What’s more, »what the owner of the program, Mrs. Madison – an American lesbian of Catcher proportions – didn’t consider, was the confusion of European languages. Instead of one program, she has a dozen on her hands.«
The show is basically worthless, but it leads to a transformation in him – not into a beetle, as in Kafka, but into the media professional he perhaps always wanted to be: »The last traces of the whiny emigrant fell away from me, and another began to emerge: the hands-on, worldly reporter.« But he immediately qualifies this: »Half bluff, half authentic.« Now financially secure, he buys the convertible he has long dreamed of – a two-seater 1932 Chrysler that looked like a Ferrari and made a similar noise. And now he dares to get married: to an Englishwoman. Sports cars remain a constant in his later life: »Once I start driving a four-door car, I’ll be finished for good,« he realizes. Professionally, he benefits from the fact that America is becoming more and more interested in Europe (more precisely: in its resurgent markets there), so that the new radio program Report from Europe quickly finds many takers in the US: a hundred radio stations.
Georg Stefan Troller is now truly in his element – and discovers that interviewing is his true domain. »I learned,« he reports, »that with research, empathy, and a sense of rhythm and theatricality, it could be turned into a small work of art.« And he learned »to talk about myself indirectly through others. That was actually forbidden; objectivity was the order of the day in the 1950s.« His motto now is: »To hell with objectivity! And with all the rules that are presented to us as irrefutable.« At this point in his autobiography, he reveals almost all the secrets of his (interview) work, which soon becomes his trademark. This includes what he calls »reversed vanity«: »I created the event, but pretended that I had stumbled upon it quite by accident. I conducted the interview, but attributed everything to the brilliance of my counterpart.« But he immediately qualifies this: »I can’t claim that I was a journalist with heart and soul, though. After all, the body had to make a living.« That’s why he stands with his microphone in front of the Élysée Palace and the celebrity hangout Elysée-Matignon, observing, gossiping, and selling: »Politicians, couturiers, chanson singers, cineastes, actors, hookers, and the ›man on the street.‹« Basically, this is the same clientele that he later portrays in his Paris Journal, now with the support of the camera.
After the Hungarian uprising, »which changed my perspective,« he began to incorporate political events more strongly into his journalistic work. He thought about the Austro-Hungarian past of his homeland and his relatives who came from the eastern part of the former Danube Monarchy. He realized that journalism could only be a satisfying profession if one was committed to it. But what for? This was not an easy question, especially in the 1950s. In any case, he decided that he should »somehow become a participant rather than an observer.« »Find enthusiasm again. Something that (but was there such a thing?) connected journalism with my inner life.« French politics and its protagonists were out of the question, that much was clear to him. »De Gaulle aroused my discomfort, unlike my colleague Scholl-Latour,« who later became studio manager in Paris. »To this day, I distrust all collective and revivalist movements,« he adds. »I saw him as a Dollfuß, an authoritarian Maxi-Metternich.« De Gaulle also despised the media, he says.
During these years, Troller produced radio plays on an assembly line and earned a lot of money. He benefited from the fact that people in post-war Germany were increasingly interested in what was happening in their neighboring country. And the freelance Paris correspondent delivered. His »subjects« included inventors of private submarines, imaginative architects, poetic prodigies, open-air painters whose works were not directly »suitable for radio,« and clochards »whose burps were at least audible.« He finds himself at car shows, art salons, and fortune-teller salons, at premieres, midinette days, and at the black nights at Pigalle. But that’s not all: »I know all the chanson singers, from Chevalier and Piaf to Aznavour and Brel. All the fashion designers from Dior to Chanel and Cardin. All the painters from Utrillo and Braque to Dali and Chagall.« He turns all these topics and people into four- to five-minute radio pieces, including interviews. Troller estimates that he has produced 2,000 reports over the years. He has long been considered a specialist in »all things Parisian.« Meanwhile, the flâneur is once again capturing what he sees in photographs, having bought a new Leica in Munich. »I am the visual chronicler of a dying Paris,« he says, »the remains of which (in the Latin Quarter, in the Marais) will be preserved in aspic for a lot of money twenty years from now.«
But Troller only realizes with some delay that interest in his radio reports is waning. »The fact that I eventually went into television was solely due to the fact that it came to me,« he reports. Südwestfunk, which was responsible for France at the time, was looking for someone to cover the neighboring country – initially without a budget or an office. Troller, who is immediately hooked and from that moment on no longer touches his camera for professional purposes, now throws himself wholeheartedly into the new medium of television. He feels at home here from the start because everything seems to fit. He can apply everything he has learned and experienced. This adds up to a diverse list: »Art. Posters. Crafts. Theater and cinema. Journalism. Radio. Poetry recitation. And photography. And Paris.« He feels that his »mixed background« makes him perfect for this »mixed medium of television.« He immediately demonstrates what he understands by new standards for the visual medium – he shows excerpts from a press conference given by de Gaulle that consist solely of facial expressions and gestures as well as constructed text. The production is linked to his first live appearance on television, but pretty much everything goes wrong. Afterwards, however, he has a relieving experience with the »TV audience.« Outside the studio in Baden-Baden, from where the program was broadcast, a man approaches him and says: »But you’re the … we just saw you on TV … no, what a coincidence, what luck!«
However, he not only learns how quickly one can become popular through this medium, but also that it creates unfamiliar pressure – especially when private problems are added to the mix. An early midlife crisis: »Frustrated ambition. A marriage that was falling apart. Now I was also overcome by the ›green-eyed demon,‹ sexual jealousy.« He swallows a whole tube of sleeping pills and, like Stefan Zweig in exile in Brazil a decade and a half earlier, writes a suicide note. But Georg Stefan Troller is saved and, after having his stomach pumped, wakes up in a Paris hospital, »dazed but in high spirits,« he recalls. »Of course, that’s when things really took off. All you have to do is show life its downside, and it comes crawling back.« And indeed it did, in the form of the show Paris Journal, which Westdeutscher Rundfunk, now responsible for France, had launched. After the first few episodes, which were moderately successful, he was offered the job. That’s his thing. »I was tireless. I became the Paris Journal.« But he still had a lot to learn in order to be able to create the »colorful potpourri« he had in mind: »People with stories that all had something to do with Paris. Parisian stories. Finally, I could get rid of the Paris that was rumbling in my gut.« It caught on and took off, »with a vehemence that is incomprehensible to me today,« he says with the benefit of hindsight.
After a few years, Troller compiled what he had achieved and how it had come about, who he had interviewed, and what constituted his »French feeling« in a »book for enthusiasts and insiders.« Its title was that of the program and, with its expert tips, served also as a Paris city guide for many Francophiles (cf. Troller 1966). For the show Paris Journal, he received the first of around forty awards, including two Golden Nymphs from Monte Carlo and various Adolf Grimme Prizes, as well as an Oscar nomination for Welcome in Vienna, the third part of his escape story, which was based on a collaboration with the Viennese director Axel Conti. The film ran for eighteen months in the cinemas of his second home, Paris, where it became something of a cult film, Troller recounts with justified pride. »So I was famous,« he notes with satisfaction. Sometimes, of course, he is confused with his studio manager »Doctor Scholl-Latour,« who is much more visible on television, while Troller only allows himself to be filmed from behind during interviews. Even in his approximately 170 documentaries, he has only endeavored to be thematically present without appearing in the picture himself. Troller obviously does not seek the limelight, does not want to be a »dandy for intellectuals,« even though he was initially considered a »celebrity hunter.« But it is precisely in this area that he considers himself useless, leaving the »chasing« to his energetic and brilliantly networked assistant, a Parisian, because he considers himself far too shy for it. In addition, he claims that he has never really cared much for celebrities, as they are usually quite unproductive in interviews.
In the long run, he also finds it less and less enjoyable to be »praised as the inventor of television feature programs.« So he looks for new challenges and finds them at newly founded, national public broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) in Mainz, Germany, which he had previously only known from postcards. His new program is called Personenbeschreibung (Person Description), which he continues to produce from Paris, where Peter Scholl-Latour is once again working as studio manager, now for ZDF. The secretary in charge, Kirsten (»a blonde creature from Hamburg«) became his second wife. With the format, he was now able to practice television as a collaborative effort and produce programs that he himself enjoyed. »They called it ›positive,‹« he reports, »which is probably because I have a rather negative attitude.« And then he repeats the purpose of the format, as he would later do in numerous interviews: »People pointed to its ›life advice,‹ and that seems to me to be based on the fact that it represents my private survival guide.« In doing so, he only asks »questions that I need to know myself,« as he did with the Paris Journal, which he now remembers with mixed feelings. In an interview many years later, he even says: »With the Paris Journal, I received many letters, including expressions of affection. And then I said to myself, I might as well produce quality. And not this crap of the Paris Journal.« (Smoltczyk/Gros 2021)
However, this was probably not meant entirely seriously, because in his latest book, entitled Meine ersten 100 Jahre (My First 100 Years), which contains »New Stories and Reports« (subtitle), he once again devotes an anecdotal review to fifty episodes over a period of about ten years. In it, he reveals that he had only accepted the offer to take over the format, which had been in existence for several months, due to special circumstances at the time. The filmmaker who had been responsible for it had »once disposed of his program’s petty cash in a rather personal manner (I think he spent it all in one night at the Pigalle).« Now WDR entrusted the journal, conceived as a »cinematic description of the city,« to a correspondent who had made a name for himself as a flâneur in Paris since his radio days and immediately decided »on gut instinct […] not to show postcard Paris, but the real life of its inhabitants.«
This seemed an unusual approach at a time when, according to Troller’s observation, the new medium of television was primarily understood in Germany as an »educational medium […] a kind of finishing school for girls with prescribed emotions. How it got on my nerves, this sudden standing to attention in front of benevolence!« Today, this approach is called »political correctness« – and Troller clearly has no interest in that either. »My Paris,« he says of his »counter-concept,« was to be characterized by a camera »that pushed its way everywhere.« And above all: »A reality that denied or hid nothing.« Accompanied by a text »that had to be a slap in the face to what was common on television at the time – feuilletonistic, ironic, caustic, self-referential, sophisticated. In other words: ›Jewish‹.« (Troller 2021: 84f.) This program bore the signature of the flâneur Georg Stefan Troller.
Probably none of the journalistic memoirists has revealed the secrets of his work as generously as this TV celebrity. Like hardly anyone else, he loved to talk and write about journalistic work – there are hardly any professional secrets left to discover in his case. Over the years, Troller became noticeably estranged from developments in real-life journalism. In an interview, he complained that the press did not represent public opinion. He said it now saw itself »as a kind of public educator, but the masses, with their prejudices and fears of immigrants and refugees, which are not heard in the press, do not feel represented, and certainly not in parliament or in government.« He recognized earlier than others: »There are silent majorities coming our way that we have no idea about because they never appeared in the press.« In his later years, Georg Stefan Troller spoke with journalists from time to time – especially when he published another book after his many films. On these occasions, he varied what he had already written in his memoirs: about humans as hybrid beings, about coincidences in his life that led him to journalism, about the German-Austrian past, and, in particular, about asking the right questions in interviews.[2]
Since his Selbstbeschreibung, it had become a central concern for Troller to reveal the structure of his interviews, which had made him famous. He had conducted more than a thousand of them and now made a fine distinction between two categories: »On the one hand, the brisk cross-examination, where you use sharp questioning and provocation to get the bigwigs out of their well-rehearsed routine in order to pinpoint their true strengths and weaknesses.« But he himself prefers a different kind of interview: »One where you unconsciously suggest to your partner that you understand them. That you accept them. That you like them, even love them. That they can open up to you as an equal. That you see them as they see themselves.« And if you meet them on equal terms, there is a chance they will want to reveal everything about themselves. »Even things they didn’t necessarily want to reveal, and especially those things.« Troller knew from experience that this kind of thing does not work
»with bluffing (or only a little), but you have to actually feel it […] Then you’re in business. Not only are you in business, but you’ve also gained something for yourself, because in these conversations, you also have to reveal all kinds of things about yourself. You are a gangster and a prostitute, a banker and a boxer, a heretic and a mystic all rolled into one. You discover that you have all these things, and infinitely more, within you. Through your questions, you find out a lot about yourself, not necessarily flattering things.«
In his later years, Georg Stefan Troller described and explained in various interviews how his »cannibalism« worked and why he had conducted conversations with more or less prominent figures as a kind of self-awareness trip. By revealing his methods so candidly and unveiling the secrets of his work, he was also a kind of Edgar Allan Poe of journalism.
In a conversation with two journalists, which was printed on two pages in the national weekly newspaper Die Zeit, the now 102-year-old repeated in other words what had driven him in his »cannibalism«: »Making a film about another person meant being allowed to fall in love with that person. And it was an invitation to my counterpart and the audience to love me.« He then asks his interlocutors (one of whom is Harald Wieser, who once disenchanted German TV star Werner Höfer because of his Nazi past) whether it is even permissible to say this out loud. Georg Stefan Troller once again defends himself against the prejudice that he filmed so much with celebrities: »That’s nonsense. I was always much more interested in the weak and the outcasts.« He approached idealists with mistrust: »Because behind idealism, there is often something completely different hiding. An idealist is always also an illusionist. I was one myself.« Over time, he had to learn that this was also nonsense. So he went from being a »stupid illusionist to a realist.« That is another reason why he is at peace with himself. »Somehow, I always slipped through,« he notes gratefully. »Really often in my life.« At the end, his interviewers quote Charlie Chaplin, who said when he was approaching 90 that, after a certain age, even joy hurts. Does he agree? Troller’s answer: »The older I get, the more positively I view the world, despite all the gloom. All in all, you could say that I started out as a pessimist and, after overcoming a thousand obstacles, became an optimist. I don’t think that’s a bad conclusion.« (quoted in Aisslinger/Wieser 2024: 42)
Those who met Georg Stefan Troller in person were surprised if they had expected a tall man with a pronounced ego – as is characteristic of many TV celebrities. With his ponytail, which he wore into his eighties, he appeared petite, reserved, and almost shy, but extremely friendly, observing his surroundings with curious eyes. He died in Paris on September 27, 2025. He would have turned 104 on December 10.
This obituary is an abridged and slightly modified version of a portrait that, along with 40 other descriptions of individuals, is included in the author’s new book on German-Jewish »media legends,« which will be published shortly by Herbert von Halem Verlag. Siegfried Weischenberg (2025): Schuld und Geheimnis. Bekenntnisse von Legenden in der deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik. Cologne: Herbert von Halem.
About the author
Dr. Siegfried Weischenberg (*1948) started out as a journalist before moving to academia. After a professorship in journalism at the University of Dortmund (1979-1982), he was appointed to chairs at the University of Münster (1982-2000) and the University of Hamburg (2000-2014) to teach communication studies and media sociology.
References
Aisslinger, Moritz; Wieser, Harald (2024): »So alt bin ich nun auch nicht«. Ein Jahrhundertleben: Der Regisseur und Schriftsteller Georg Stefan Troller entkam als Junge in Wien den Nazis. In: Die Zeit no. 35, dated 15 August 2024, pp. 42f.
Benjamin, Walter (1991): Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 559f.
Hartmann, Maren (2006): Der Kulturkritiker als Flaneur. Walter Benjamin, die Passage und die neuen (Medien-) Technologien. In: Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 54(2), pp. 289–307.
Mischke, Joachim (2009): Im Porträt: Georg Stefan Troller – Wer fragt, lebt. In: Hamburger Abendblatt, dated 27 June 2009. https://www.abendblatt.de/vermischtes/journal/thema/article108517104/Im-Portraet-Georg-Stefan-Troller-Wer-fragt-lebt.html (4 November 2025)
Mönninger, Michael (2004): Das Geheimnis der Nr. 9. In: Die Zeit no. 11, dated 4 March 2004, pp. 73f.
Smoltczyk, Alexander; Gros, Hauke (2021): Die ganzen Filme sind auch Schreie nach Liebe. In: Spiegel no. 37, dated 10 September 2021. https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/georg-stefan-troller-die-ganzen-filme-sind-auch-schreie-nach-liebe-a-0bc0e36b-bc71-4327-9396-858bd949f51d (4 November 2025)
Troller, Georg Stefan (1966): Pariser Journal. Ein Buch für Liebhaber und Eingeweihte. Hamburg: Marion von Schröder.
Troller, Georg Stefan (1988): Selbstbeschreibung. Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring.
Troller, Georg Stefan (2009): Selbstbeschreibung. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler.
Troller, Georg Stefan (2021): Meine ersten 100 Jahre. Neue Geschichten und Berichte. Hürth: Edition Memoria, pp. 83-114.
Wittstock, Uwe (2024): Marseille 1940. Die große Flucht der Literatur. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Footnotes
1 Quotations not accompanied by an exact source reference are all taken from Troller’s first memoirs (Georg Stefan Troller (1988): Selbstbeschreibung, Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring).
2 See Viola Gräfenstein: Ein gutes Interview ist wie eine gute Beichte. Der Österreicher Georg Stefan Troller kam durch Zufall zum Journalismus, in: DJV NRW Journal 2017/01, pp. 16-18 and: Claudia Tieschky/Hans-Jürgen Jakobs: »In mir bleiben alle Fragen offen«. Filmemacher Georg Stefan Troller über Deutschland, Suche nach Identität, den Papst und die Kunst des Interviews, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 23/24, 2005, p. 20; Yvonne Aebersold: Dann sind wir Helden, aber erst dann. Von einem, der die Bilder liebt, seine Sprache verlor und auszieht, die Menschen, die Menschen mit Fragen zu fangen, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 27, 2005, p. 40.
About this article
Copyright
This article is distributed under Creative Commons Atrribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. You must however give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. More Information under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en.
Citation
Siegfried Weischenberg: The flâneur and his ›cannibal interviews‹. On the death of Georg Stefan Troller. In: Journalism Research, Vol. 8 (3-4), 2025, pp. 359-374. DOI: 10.1453/2569-152X-3-42025-15605-en
ISSN
2569-152X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1453/2569-152X-3-42025-15605-en
First published online
December 2025