Biography
Georg Stefan Troller, born December 10, 1921 in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family, fled the Nazis in 1938 at the age of 16 and eventually emigrated to the United States. There he kept his head above water as a bookbinder and was drafted into military service in WW2 in 1943, with the U.S. Army using him primarily to interrogate German-speaking prisoners of war.
After the end of the war and the liberation of Austria from Nazi rule, Troller returned to his country of birth, but felt increasingly alien there. After launching the popular question-and-answer program "XY weiss alles" at the American Viennese radio station "Rot-Weiß-Rot," he returned to the U.S. and studied English at the University of California from 1946 to 1949 and then theater at New York's Columbia University.
With a Fulbright scholarship to the Sorbonne University in Paris in his pocket, he returned to Europe again in 1949. However, he did not take up his studies, preferring to accept an offer as a Paris radio reporter for the radio station RIAS Berlin (Radio in the American Sector). He gained his first experience as a television journalist in the late 1950s as a reporter for the regional public broadcasting corporation Südwestfunk (SWF).
From 1962 Troller worked for the regional public broadcasting corporation WDR, where he rose to fame with the "Pariser Journal" (1962-1971): the reportage program was a great success with the public and received numerous awards over the years, including two prestigious Grimme Awards and the Berlin Art Prize for Film and Television. Appointed by public broadcaster ZDF as special correspondent in Paris in 1972, Troller began his now legendary series "Personenbeschreibungen" (Descriptions of People), for which he produced a total of 70 episodes. With his emphatically subjective way of asking questions, he was initially controversial among traditional journalists and editors, as he disregarded "journalistic neutrality", however his interview style became very influencial in the field of celebrity interviews.
In addition to his work as a journalist, reporter and book author, Georg Stefan Troller also worked as a screenwriter in the 1970s and 80s. In this capacity he worked primarily with the director Axel Corti, for whom he wrote, among others, the screenplays for "Der junge Freud" (1976) and the Holocaust trilogy "An uns glaubt Gott nicht mehr" (1982), "Santa Fe" (1986) and "Welcome in Vienna" (1986, Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film).
Troller's numerous longer documentaries, such as "Mord aus Liebe" (1993), about the Bubi Scholz case, and "Amok!" (2001), about the rampage of the American student Wayne Lo, were highly acclaimed by critics and audiences. Between 1998 and 2001, his six-part documentary series "Hollywood-Profile" received a lot of attention, in which he portrayed stars such as John Malkovich and Woody Allen in his usual personal way.
In 2002, Troller, who has received numerous awards throughout his career, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class.
Troller's last documentary was "Tage und Nächte in Paris" (2004), about the attitude to life in the French capital, which became his adopted home from 1949.
In 2005 Troller was awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize, an Austrian literary award "for writing in resistance and exile." He remained active as a book author. He wrote nonfiction books about Paris (e.g., "Pariser Esprit," 2010) and described his encounters of the past decades in several books, such as in "Ihr Unvergesslichen. 22 starke Begegnungen" (2006) and in "Liebe, Lust und Abenteuer. 97 Begegnungen meines Lebens" (2019). In 2009, a supplemented edition of his autobiography "Selbstbeschreibung" was published, in 2016 the autobiography "Unterwegs auf vielen Straßen. Erlebtes und Erinnertes". In 2017 he received the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria.
At DOK.fest Munich 2021, Ruth Rieser's documentary "Auslegung der Wirklichkeit – Georg Stefan Troller" ("Interpretation of Reality – Georg Stefan Troller") celebrated its world premiere; in the same year, Troller received the Honorary Award of the German Documentary Film Prize.