“Everything seems to be going a bit downhill at this moment: in America with Trump, in Germany with the economy, in France with politics,” says the writer, journalist and filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller in “Welt am Sonntag”. “But since you’ve experienced all of this before, it doesn’t make you despair, but rather gives you an ironic grin.”
Troller can say that. He is now 103 years old and one of the great witnesses of our century. 80 years ago, the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers of the Red Army. Three months later, Troller was involved in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp as a US Army soldier.
In a moving interview, the witness of the century talks to Mathias Döpfner about his Jewish childhood in Vienna, about the irony of age and faith in God, about the love of the German language and the fear of anti-Semitic violence.
Troller: Germany is afraid of conflict!
He is afraid that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th will not remain an isolated incident. “Everything can repeat itself,” says Troller. “History constantly repeats itself, only with different signs or instruments and weapons.”
Given the growing support for the AfD and the dwindling support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia, Troller’s answer to the question of what we Germans can do to prevent history from repeating itself sounds like a comment on the current situation: “I’m afraid In Germany, people have always hated not so much the Nazis as the war they started. You are afraid of getting involved in a conflict. Even if it is an honest defensive battle like in Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, the Paris-based intellectual, who fled via Czechoslovakia to France and finally to the USA after the forced “annexation” of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, speaks of the German language being his home, his “form of patriotism”. . “No other culture has inspired us as much as the German one,” he says in an interview. “The murderous hatred they showed us is all the more incomprehensible.”
At the end of the detailed conversation, the 103-year-old gave an assessment of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which repelled him more than attracted him: “Because our world is already more and more inclined towards alienation, towards abstraction. For example, lovers used to look flirtatiously at each other on the Paris metro, but now they sit back to back and stare at their iPhones. The World Chess Championship used to be a kind of sporting event. Now that the AI has beaten the world champion, no one cares about it anymore.” Nothing real remains.
The full interview from “Welt am Sonntag” is available HERE to read.