Translations:Otto Eckart (Da VIII 23)/3/en

Otto Eckart at the age of around three years.

Otto Eckart was born on March 8, 1877, in the house at Gärtnerplatz 1 in Munich. He was the eighth of Johannes and Susanne Eckart’s 13 children. His younger sister Hedwig describes Otto as a "delicate and sickly child" that his siblings frequently had to escort home early from the elementary school they attended together. The time at the high school Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich was a difficult one for Otto; he was only enthused by the subjects of drawing and music. Therefore, his father took him out of school after the intermediate school certificate and sent him to Bordeaux for a year abroad, as he had done previously with Otto’s brother Fritz. There, Otto stayed with friends of the Eckarts – the Horeau family, whose son stayed on an exchange with the Eckarts in Munich – and attended commercial school. After staying in Bordeaux, Otto spent some time in Paris. When back in Munich, he spoke "impeccable French, had a likeable, confident, elegant demeanor, looked very interesting … and endeared himself to everybody." However, the fact that Otto had turned into a bon vivant subsequently got him into many a scrape.