He studies his interlocutor intensively with warm, alert brown eyes. He speaks with a deep, clear voice in a charming Viennese accent. Georg Stefan Troller is 90 years old. He is a witness to history, an author, a journalist, a fi lmmaker, and a humanitarian. He is of the old world, in the best sense – cosmopolitan, bright, educated, eloquent. An acute and insightful observer of society and a conciliator of its confl icts and contradictions. Through countless portraits, he brought France closer to its neighbors in Germany. He is a European in the actual sense of the word. He lives his Jewishness without ever making a show of it. People have made him curious since he was a young boy. He treats everyone he meets with respect, and from these meetings, he has crafted thousands of unforgettable interviews and portraits. He looks into people’s souls. People open up to him. They sense that he loves them. Georg Stefan Troller is a Mentsch…
JVG: You were born in Vienna in 1921, and at the age of 17 you fled via France to the United States. In 1945, you returned to Europe as an offi cer of the US Army, and have lived in Paris since 1949. How did you cope with your fl ight from home?
G.S. Troller: Emigration always entails a loss of identity. When you’re tossed around from place to place, you hardly know who you are anymore. One loses every shred of self-esteem. That feeling of not belonging sticks with you. You’re a stranger everywhere you go. I had to fill this huge void somehow, to become a “somebody.” I came to Paris, and I actually wanted to continue my studies at the Sorbonne. But I was already 30 years old. So I landed a job as a radio reporter. You were Germany’s man at the Seine. At first in the “Pariser Journal” and later in the documentary series “Personal Profiles”.
You were the “man on television”…
Television saved me. Journalism was the only thing that could satisfy my restless longings. I was always interested in uncovering the hidden personal secrets of my interview subjects. At the same time, this intensive engagement with other people also helped me to solve my own issues. Every interview centered on a feeling of sympathy, an offering of love to the person I was speaking with. A good interview is like a confession. And it is also a matter of forgiveness. Beyond that, I wanted the viewers to identify with this stranger, whom they quite possibly didn’t even like too much, and come to the recognition, “Hey … that’s me!” That way, the people in the TV audience got to know themselves a little bit better as well.
In your interviews, you got close to people like almost no one else…
Often, it was the most ordinary people who impressed me the most. I was able to shine a light on lives, fates, poverty, disability, people who muddled through against the odds and never gave up on surviving. I’m thinking, for example, of the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic: At 21 years old, his disabled body had suddenly made him an asexual being. He survived. He’s been in a wheelchair for 40 years, and he’s still a fi ghter. He writes a book, it becomes a success, and it is made into a fi lm by Oliver Stone. He fi ghts against the war with the power of words.
You have written sixteen books, all in German. Is Germany still your cultural homeland?
When you lose your homeland, and for me that was the Austria of my childhood, then all you have left is your language. My fear of losing my language grew into a neurosis, and it still is even today…
According to a recent study, 20 percent of Germans bear latent anti- Semitism. How do you view the Germans today?
But those aren’t the ones that you meet. Those are the ones who have lost out, who are looking for an excuse for their failed lives. They used to be left-wing, and now they are right-wing. I always assume that Germans have no prejudices against me. I travel in Germany without hindrance and free of fear. And like all returned emigrants, I am deeply impressed at how thoroughly the Germans have dealt with their past.
What could the Germans learn about dealing with Jews from the French?
The vast majority of French society has a relaxed and easy way of dealing with Jews. Here, no one would ever point out the Jewish background of André Maurois, Bernard Henri Lévy, or Alain Finkielkraut. In Germany, on the other hand, not a single article about me has been published that did not mention that I am the “son of a Jewish furrier from Vienna.” I think Germans would do well to relax a little.
By Brigitte Sträter