Georg Stefan Troller has always looked carefully, and now the photographer, narrator, interviewer and philanthropist has celebrated his 100th birthday
He calls himself “the picture chronicler of the little things”. In fact, Georg Stefan Troller never lost sight of the little things. And because all the little things hold the big picture together to this day, Troller always had the world in view. And the people who inhabit this world.
His world is above all: Paris. There he wandered the narrow streets in the sixties, just like cats do, who are known to be his favorite animals. With a keen eye and a warm heart, he wandered through the districts that had gradually been consecrated to extinction because the cracked facades, rotten staircases and leaky roofs were a thorn in the side of the so-called city fathers. The ailing stood for the past, and the presumed misery of the people who lived there stood for the painful realization that modernity had by no means seeped into every corner of the Seine metropolis.
And so Georg Stefan Troller stood in the alleys with his Leica, looking up at the roofs, under which for decades people have lived again and again who could only afford a life there, in the slums, areas like Ménilmontant. Troller was there day and night with his camera to get closer to people, to capture the little things and the special moments. Anyone who sees Troller’s Paris photos, which were taken in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, clearly sees how often the little things and the special moment are one and the same.
Troller is always close because he is irresistibly attracted by the morbid, the supposedly repulsive. Where the suspended live, the clochards, the whores and the drinkers, that’s where he wants to see what’s going on behind the curtains. He mingles with the flea market traders and market women, he drifts through the Parisian nightlife in the wild sixties and literally discovers the next story on every corner.
He wants to understand what drives people – no matter how profane what they do. Troller dedicates an entire broadcast of his “Pariser Journal” to the young men who tirelessly do their rounds in a small square with their mopeds and small convertibles, amused and at the same time closely eyed by young women sitting in the cafés around the small square, which he shot for ARD from 1962 to 1971. He also visits the homeless people who celebrate Christmas Eve together under the Tournelle Bridge, beyond the splendor of the pre-Christmas shimmering metropolis, to hear their stories.
It seems as if Troller – himself a rather eccentric figure with a distinctive mustache, gentle and yet inquisitive look – draws his strength and inspiration again and again from the sight of the decaying, from the affection for those who do not care. And it seems as if his courage to approach all these people and the misery in which they sometimes live is fed from the certainty that everything will end at some point. But only at some point. Here and now he wants to seize the moment and preserve what is there.
Infinitely lucky
Because Georg Stefan Troller is not only the picture chronicler of the little things quoted at the beginning, but “the picture chronicler of the small, silly, dying things”, as he writes in his book “A Dream of Paris” published in 2017. In this book he bundles his Paris photos, which were believed to be lost for many years. And tells the story again of how hard he wrestled with the city he still lives in today; how long it took to feel at home there. Paris, mon amour? Not at all! It took Troller decades to reconcile with the city that would become the center of his life. For many years he saw Paris as a “city that disapproved of me”, which at the time seemed “scary to suspicious”, “probably from the time of occupation, which I had witnessed”.
As an Austrian with Jewish roots, he left Vienna, the city of his birth, at the age of 17, fleeing to France via Czechoslovakia. When the Germans invade, Troller was lucky enough to get an exit visa for the USA in 1941. He returned to Germany as a US soldier in 1945 and documented the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp as a photographer. interrogates German prisoners of war as native speakers. But this is not the first time in his life that Troller is close to the abyss. Even as a boy, as a Jew, he experienced teasing, verbal abuse, and marginalization.
Troller soon realizes how much his own experiences of exclusion and the horrors of the war – especially the dead in Dachau – shape his work. In an interview with NDR these days, he said: “All the dead were lying around, then I looked for my face in the dead. It could have been me who was lying there if I hadn’t been so infinitely lucky. “
He was probably lucky, and chance also played into the cards for the young Troller, after studying in the USA and returning to Germany, he first went to the radio, then to the newspaper, then to television, for which he went to Paris. He later calls journalism “a means of self-healing and saving lives”. Most of all it is healing for him. that he could ask people, whether famous or not, “timeless questions”, whereby Troller understands timeless questions to be those questions that he has about himself, as Wikipedia says.
It was also healing for him to realize that he was always lucky. And Troller also recognizes that luck is also a talent, as James Krüss once wrote – and knows how to use this principle to capture the magic of the moment in his own way. He writes in his Paris book: “Sometimes, when I stand face to face with such boulders and fragments of houses, I almost feel a kind of trance: Then I know how to track down the right section of the wall in the right light while walking night-wandering. And, as if materialized by my unconscious, the beggar, the ball-playing child or the hood-adorned nun appear at the right second, who make this stage backdrop into a finished picture. “
Polarize his interviews
Georg Stefan Troller captured many pictures of the small, silly and dying things. He has made countless films and written books, and to this day he is an observer, storyteller and documentary maker. And to this day, in his own way, he always remains part of what it’s all about. There were always voices criticizing Troller for precisely this lack of distance. A lack of distance that Troller did not give up when he met international stars like Romy Schneider, Woody Allen or boxing legend Muhammad Ali for an interview. He “purred” them all, as Ilja Richter wrote in his homage in the “taz”, purred around them “like a seductive, clever cat”. A self-confident one on top of that, because apart from Troller not many dared to ask dreaded interviewees like Alain Delon whether he really had such a hideous character as it always said …
But why should someone like Troller, who has cheated death and still had to look horror in the eye, be afraid of moody stars? And why should he change his interview style (which, with all due respect, can indeed create moments of stranger shame) just because some people rub themselves against it? Although there is a subtle difference that is blurred every now and then: In his reports for the “Pariser Journal”, Troller has always walked the fine line that separates curiosity from voyeurism. For his interviews, on the other hand, he deliberately crossed this fine dividing line again and again. After around 1,500 interviews that he conducted over the past century, his style is considered legendary.
And when a man like Troller, who celebrated his 100th birthday on December 10th and continues to cultivate self-irony in the most subtle way, presents a book with the title “My First Century” at the age of 99, then all that remains is to say: We are looking forward to your second century, Mr. Troller.
