Surveyor of the world – THE WORLD

There was hardly any talk show – couch on which he not sat in his famous mumble told the world: Peter Scholl-Latour coined the image of the Germans of world politics. As a television reporter, he was one of the most popular faces, as a book author, he brought it with books like “Death in the rice field” in millions of copies. At the age of 90 years Scholl-Latour died on Saturday in Rhöndorf am Rhein.

Scholl-Latour, born in 1924 in Bochum, grew up as the son of a doctor in upper-class conditions on. The mother came from Alsace, the father of Lorraine. The proximity to France was him so already in the cradle.

The parents were against Hitler and sent their son to a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland, to spare him the indoctrination by the Nazi education system. The young Peter did not mind at the clerical orientation, on the contrary, many decades later, he stressed that he was there taught life lessons and -. Catholicism practiced there that should help him once the understanding of Islam

There were things in the life of “PSL”, about which he himself spoke rarely and reluctantly. For example, that he was exposed as the son of a Jewish mother in National Socialism as a “half-breed the first degree” persecutions. On the run from the Nazis in 1945, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo, the torture he barely survived. Shortly after the end of World War II, he broke with the French paratroopers on towards Indochina.

Two years later returned Scholl-Latour back and opted for a career as a journalist that began with an internship at the “Saarbrücken newspaper”. A little later he was and as editor and radio correspondent in the United States , in Canada, Mexico, Pakistan, India, Indochina, Turkey , Persia, Southeast Asia, Latin America North Africa go. His work abroad was 1954/55 interrupted by a temporary role as spokesman for the Saar Government.

In parallel, he acquired 1950-1957 academic degrees in Mainz, Paris and Beirut , including philology, political science and Arabic, including a PhD in Paris University. “I rarely saw a man with so much purposeful ambition”, the filmmaker and author Georg Stefan Troller once said. He had in 1963 with Scholl-Latour divided until 1969 an office in Paris, as this head of ARD-France studios in Paris was.

Scholl-Latour’s professional Life was always a search for the strong feelings, “les émotions fortes,” as he liked to put it. Few can he claim that virtually every country in the world traveled to have witnessed many historical events up close, to have met many historical personalities.

Peter Scholl -Latour was a cosmopolitan. He reported from Algeria, the Congo, especially over again from Vietnam , later from Iran, China and the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union. In old age he was still traveling, it never stopped long from one place. He moved from city to city, from Paris to Berlin, Bad Godesberg into french Tourrettes-sur-Loup, wrote bestsellers, lectured, visited the foci of the world.

He loved the whole world, but especially the Vietnam at the end of French colonial rule and the Lebanon of the 50s. There he learned the Arabic language and mentality, met the mysteries of the Orient. The experience protected him in the course of his subsequent career against illusions, misconceptions and Western projections that many of his colleagues undermine that. He was a friend of the people, but he scoffed at the human nature no illusions. He himself had often looked into the abyss, he once said. For Peter Scholl-Latour’s death was “a normal act.” He has never feared him.