ABSTRACT
It has been suggested to print the legend, when the legend becomes fact (Bellah and Goldbeck, 1962). For a start, what did Otto Gross look like? According to Levinas, ‘ethics begins in apprehending the face of the Other’ (Pickering, 2008: 50). Today, only ve photographs are known to have survived (all in this book). The writer Leonhard Frank remembered Gross from ca. 1907/08:
The upper part of his face – blue eyes with an innocent, naïve gaze, a hooked nose and full lips which were always slightly opened, as if, panting silently, he was carrying the misery of the whole world – did not quite match the weakly lower part, the chin, which was only hinted at and somehow got totally lost towards the back. Whoever had seen this fanatical bird’s face once, seemingly made of slightly tinted china, never forgot it. (1976: 12)
The artist Ernst Wagner (1877-1951) saw Otto Gross as an eagle, albeit with ‘lamed wings. But his daring, penetrating eyes looked into mine in such a way that I immediately felt unmasked’ (n.d.: 182).
