Missing photos of Georg Stefan Troller: "That was my Paris, the Paris of yesterday"

Some conversations have a miraculous history. Josef Konigsberg escaped thanks to a courageous German aid Auschwitz and worked after the war in Warsaw as a radio reporter before he fled to the West. The now 94-year-old spoke to the almost three years older journalist and filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller , who also escaped the Holocaust. The son of a Jewish fur trader from Vienna fled to Paris in 1938, then to the USA and returned to Paris in 1949. There he was soon noticed as an unorthodox journalist, who always led his about 1500 interviews subjectively.

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Troller (left) and Königsberg

For three hours Konigsberg and Troller talked about the next miracle: long-lost Paris photos that Troller had made in the fifties - now at a ripe old age they still earn him a reputation as photographers.

Josef Königsberg: Mr. Troller, you are already in the 97th year of life ...

Georg Stefan Troller: I'll be on the 10th of December 97. And do not feel a day older.

Königsberg: Mr. Reich-Ranicki was asked if he was afraid of dying. He answered that he was not afraid, but regretted not seeing this beautiful world any more. How is that with you?

Troller: Not afraid of not being anymore, but afraid of disappearing from life. My wife died months ago, and I've been through it all.

Königsberg: I am extremely sorry. Mr. Troller, you are a writer, poet, television and radio reporter, presenter, have conducted about 1500 interviews. Which activity satisfied you most?

photo gallery

23 pictures

Troller: It all comes together for me. I have no outstanding talent in any direction. But the combination of art, literature, theater, cinema, television and good conversation has only given a job opportunity: documentary filmmaker. I could never have become anything else with any chance of succeeding. The invention of television has also invented me.

Königsberg: It is less well known that you were passionate about photographing in 1944 and 1945 when you fought the US army against the Nazis. And stayed there after settling permanently in Paris in 1949. These early Paris photos were published in an illustrated book of prose texts in 2017, "A Dream of Paris". Why so late?

Troller: The photos recently found my daughter Fenn in my divorced wife's apartment - under the bed as she searched for her birth certificate. There was suddenly this box full of photos, 60 years old, which I had long since thought lost, which I did not even think about anymore. The prose pieces in it are selected from old, out-of-print books by me about Paris, some of which I no longer owned, which my daughters had to fish out of the net. This resulted in the book.

Königsberg: Why this strange title "A dream of Paris"? Their pictures show run-down backyards, homeless people, a dead man in the Seine - more the dark side of Paris.

Georg Stefan Troller

Troller: And the pictures above all show children who enjoy these quarters like an adventure playground. They show long-gone districts that loved their inhabitants. And remind us of dreamscapes, have something fairy-tale, even something stage-like. Urban landscapes, as they will never be.

Königsberg: Did these long-lost recordings from the fifties correspond to your mood at the time?

Troller: That's right. Everyone chooses his Paris. That was my Paris. The Paris of yesteryear. The Paris, destined to die, to be demolished. And that was so human and somehow like a silent movie. And so animated.

Königsberg: You describe the demolition of a house in one of the book texts. What was so unusual about that?

Troller: It was not made with the wrecking ball, but with a chain that you put around the building. Two caterpillars then jerked at both ends, and the house collapsed and was dead. Lifeless as moon dust. That touched me very much.

Königsberg: What attracts you to such scenes?

Troller: I put it this way: "I am fascinated by this deathly condemned Paris of the old suburbs, whose traces are now being eradicated like wrinkles in cosmetic surgery." Almost every weekend I have to set off to photograph it, this theatrical one demolition Paris. "

Königsberg: One of the pictures stands out from these spontaneous, documentary shots. It is the only picture asked.

Georg Stefan Troller

Troller: Yes, that was in an ancient Parisian hotel, Place Contrescarpe, which has since been demolished. It was inhabited by a young acting troupe. And I staged eight of them at night. One portrayed a model, the other kissed his girlfriend, the third played on his trumpet, and at the top of the roof sits a writer at the typewriter. We worked on it for hours, and as the alternators make noise, the whole Place Contrescarpe has thrown us out of their windows with potatoes or carrots so we can stop. Film in its original state.

Königsberg: Not only your photos show the Paris of the poor, but also your early texts in the book are mainly devoted to the little people. Why?

Troller: Maybe because I felt that way then. That's the very nature of immigrant feeling. And even if you succeed later, this identification with the hopeless people, as one was once even remains.

Koenigsberg: You write in detail about an 85-year-old artist who threatens homelessness.

Troller: We shot in one of Montparnasse's many artist settlements, almost all of which were demolished without replacement, so that today there are only a few cheap artists' settlements in Paris. The old lady was the sister of the Viennese writer Egon Friedell, whom I have always admired very much. She has lamented to me that she has to move out now and has no idea where to go. She was a sculptor and did not even know where her pictures are. She talked about her brother, who killed herself during the Nazi era, and that she no longer has anyone to turn to. I recognized myself in this woman again. How helpless I had been when I escaped the Nazis at the age of 17 and was stranded for the first time in Paris.

Königsberg: Another tragic case is the Algerian Bicot, a hunchbacked peanut seller. They portrayed him.

Troller: Yes, I like this story until today. A wandering peanut trader moving from cafe to cafe. Later I met him again in Algeria and then again in Paris. Which touched me, 20 years later, after risking his life as a resistance fighter in the Algerian war: that he finally ended up being a peanut trader in Parisian cafés. In the same slum where he lived before.

Königsberg: One of your sentences I did not understand: "The city did not like me."

Troller: Well, I came from Vienna. Vienna is a cozy, a cozy city, albeit with a good dose of sadism. At that time I thought of Paris as a juggernaut, as gigantic, as disturbing. In the environment of my migrants' hotel where I lived, there was nothing that would have seemed friendly, no nature, no one who greeted or welcomed us nicely. This Paris scared me. I also spoke bad French. The French forgive everything, but not when you speak bad French.

Königsberg: After seven decades in this city your relationship to Paris should have improved.

Troller: Yes, I've learned to love it, maybe thanks to my photos and the human people in it. But home? People ask me again and again: "Has Paris become your home?" I can only answer: "A new home, that does not exist, I am content, I have my children here, I know the neighborhoods, the streets, many people, you can get along with the city, you can even love them, a home is something else, home is childhood. "

Königsberg: What are you looking forward to after such a successful life?

Troller: I started a new career at my age, as a photographer. These old Paris photos adorn a book, are shown in exhibitions, will soon be in a big Berlin auction, and suddenly I have a name as a photographer. The Marbach Literature Archive will show a marvelous exhibition until March 2019, "The Invention of Paris", with Paris images and texts by German authors. They also have a few of my pictures and really wanted to show my Leica, with whom I took these pictures. This Leica I conquered in the war, by a German prisoner of war, it is now an exhibit. So I'm a photographer now. Is nice too.

DISPLAY

Georg Stefan Troller:
A dream of Paris

Early texts and photographs

Corso an imprint of publishing house Römerweg; 176 pages; 19,00 Euro.

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Königsberg: The "time" has described you as a human researcher, philosopher, cosmopolitan, man of the century. What is true?

Troller: I can not remember the text. But I wish I was all that. That would make my life pretty much justified.

Königsberg: Mr. Troller, thank you for this interview.