The German body culture that shaped Joseph Pilates

Joseph Pilates left Germany for England in 1912, at the age of 28. The country he left was unusually preoccupied with the body. Gymnastics clubs met in every town, spa doctors sold cold water and fresh air, reformers campaigned against the corset, and new exercise systems for women were reaching bookshops with photographs that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.

Three names from that world are regularly attached to Pilates: the water-cure priest Sebastian Kneipp, the movement teacher Bess Mensendieck and the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The links are worth testing one at a time, because they are not equally strong. One is specific and plausible. One is plausible but vague. The third rests on little more than shared language and a shared belief that the way you move changes who you are.

Gymnastics clubs and life reform

First, the background. German gymnastics, Turnen, goes back to Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who opened an open-air exercise ground on the Hasenheide in Berlin in 1811. By the late nineteenth century the Turnverein, the local gymnastics club, was a fixture of German town life, and Pilates's father was an active gymnast in Mönchengladbach. That is the best documented influence on the young Pilates, and it is easy to overlook because it is so ordinary.

Alongside the clubs ran the loose movement later called Lebensreform, or life reform: vegetarianism, nature cure, open-air bathing and sunbathing, loose clothing for women, hiking clubs for the young. Physical culture added the touring strongmen and the bestselling home systems, such as the Danish gymnast J. P. Müller's My System (1904), a short daily routine that ended with a brisk rub-down of the skin. Pilates's own later enthusiasm for open windows, fresh air and vigorous brushing of the skin would have sounded entirely familiar to readers of that kind of book. So would his habit of presenting himself as a weak boy made strong, a convention of the genre examined in our piece on the asthma story.

Sebastian Kneipp: water, herbs and a regular life

Kneipp (1821 to 1897) was a Bavarian Catholic priest who became famous across Europe for cold-water treatments at Wörishofen, the town where he served, now Bad Wörishofen. His methods included cold affusions (water poured over an arm, a leg or the back), walking barefoot through wet grass or shallow water, and wraps. He combined them with herbal remedies, plain food, exercise and an orderly daily rhythm. His book My Water Cure (Meine Wasserkur, 1886) sold in huge numbers, and Kneipp associations still meet in Germany.

As an influence on Pilates, Kneipp belongs to the atmosphere rather than the method. The nature-cure culture he helped popularise was everywhere in the Germany of Pilates's youth, and Pilates's mother is often said to have practised nature cure, though I have not seen that confirmed in a document. But nothing in Contrology looks specifically like Kneipp. There is no water in it and no herbal medicine, and it asks the client to work rather than to receive a treatment.

Bess Mensendieck: the strongest case

Bess Mensendieck (1864 to 1957) was born in New York to a family of Dutch descent and studied medicine in Zurich. She also studied in New York with Genevieve Stebbins, whose mix of gymnastics, breathing and the expressive ideas of the French teacher François Delsarte was influential in America, and she drew on Swedish medical gymnastics. In 1906 she published Körperkultur des Weibes (Body Culture for Women) in Munich, and in 1910 the first institute for training teachers in her system opened.

Her subject was everyday movement as much as exercise: how to stand, sit, walk, bend, lift and carry without wasted effort. Exercises were done slowly and with full attention, and she wanted students to know which muscles they were using; her pupils often exercised unclothed so that the teacher could see the muscles at work. She located the source of good movement in the lower back and pelvis, a region she called the Zentrale, which translates loosely as the control centre.

Any Pilates student will hear the echo. Work from a strong centre, move slowly and precisely, know what each muscle is doing: these are also the habits of Contrology, and the Zentrale is not far from the deep trunk muscles Pilates teachers call the powerhouse (the anatomy is laid out in our piece on core strength for a long life). Some of the floor exercises in her 1906 book, a shoulder bridge and leg circles among them, would not look out of place on a Pilates mat.

Did Pilates know her work? There is no record that they met, and as far as I know he never credited her. The chances that he came across her ideas are still good. Her book was widely read in Germany in the years before he left in 1912. Her system was part of the body-culture scene when he returned after the war, and her work featured in the 1925 film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), a survey of that scene. From the mid 1920s both of them were teaching in New York. Of the three names, hers is the only one where the resemblance is specific enough to take seriously.

Rudolf Steiner: eurythmy and anthroposophy

Steiner (1861 to 1925) was an Austrian philosopher and the founder of anthroposophy, a spiritual movement that went on to produce Waldorf schools (the first opened in Stuttgart in 1919), biodynamic farming and a movement art called eurythmy, developed from about 1911. Eurythmy turns the sounds of speech and the notes of music into gestures of the whole body. It is closer to dance than to conditioning, and its aims are artistic and spiritual.

The link to Pilates is thin. Both men believed that movement shapes the inner person, and Pilates did write about spirit, but he meant something practical and energetic, closer to morale than to Steiner's esoteric teaching. I can find no sign that he drew on eurythmy, and the two practices look nothing alike in a room.

The candidates side by side

What actually shaped him

The influences that can be documented are humbler than the famous names: his father's gymnastics club, boxing and the strongman culture, and, by his own account, close study of anatomy and of the way animals move. Then came his internment in Britain during the First World War, where by most accounts he taught fellow internees, and later the dancers and private clients of New York, who tested and refined the work for forty years.

The fairest summary is that Pilates absorbed a culture rather than copying a teacher. Mensendieck is the one figure whose family resemblance is close enough to repay a careful look. The best way to see it is to put her exercise photographs beside the pictures of Pilates in Return to Life Through Contrology (1945) and look only at the pelvis: how level it is, and how still it stays while the legs move. Her book itself is the subject of a reader's guide to Body Culture for Women.