K.E. von Schnitzler, 83; East Germany’s Top TV Commentator

Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, 83, the most prominent television commentator in East Germany who for decades railed against capitalism on his weekly show, died Thursday of pneumonia in Zeuthen, southeast of Berlin.

Schnitzler was born into a titled Prussian family in Berlin in 1918. He was captured as a prisoner of war by British troops in 1944, and later that year joined the German service of the British Broadcasting Corp.

After World War II, he helped found a West German radio station, but he later defected to East Berlin, becoming East German television’s chief commentator.

With his weekly 20-minute show, “The Black Channel,” Schnitzler came to be reviled by his countrymen as a symbol of the Cold War philosophy used to justify decades of repressive rule.

Amid the first reform efforts by a European Communist government faced with mounting pro-democracy protests, Schnitzler lost his job Oct. 30, 1989--10 days before the Berlin Wall fell.