Associated Press correspondent Roland Prinz, who spent decades covering Europe, dies at age 85

By DANICA KIRKA
Associated Press

VIENNA (AP) — A former Associated Press correspondent who spent four decades covering the Cold War and the fall of communism has died at age 85. Roland Prinz was born in what was then Czechoslovakia as Nazi Germany’s troops began marching across central Europe. The continent’s geopolitical conflicts gripped him for most of the rest of his life. Prinz was a linchpin of of the AP’s coverage of the turmoil that accompanied the end of the Cold War, starting with the rise of Solidarity in Poland, stretching through the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the fall of the Berlin Wall and finally the breakup of Yugoslavia. He died in Vienna on Nov. 20.