Description

Born in Asserballe, Denmark in 1866, J.P. Müller was, for a time, as famous as that other Danish export, Hans Christian Anderson. Maybe more. At the turn of the last century, Müller’s wildly popular cult of physical fitness swept Mitteleuropa, turning parlor-sitting dandies from Copenhagen to Berlin to London into ironmen. Müller’s My System was published first in 1904 as little more than a long, bound pamphlet graced with an image of the Greek athlete Apoxyomenos naked and toweling himself. The exercise guide, which promised that just “15 minutes a day” of prescribed * exercise would make “weaklings” into strong men (and women), was ultimately translated into 25 languages, reprinted dozens of times, and sold briskly well into the 20th century.The Müller system is pretty much as I observed each morning growing up; it is something like a precursor to Pilates, it borrows from ballet, and it needs no equipment, other than commitment. It is strict but appealingly accessible. Unlike some of the other popular physical fitness gurus of the time—including the Prussian Eugene Sandow, who is known as the father of bodybuilding—Müller wasn’t interested in building muscle mass through dumbbells. And while My System wasn’t only aimed at men—in his original pamphlet, he explains that a woman needs to develop a “muscular corset” (that is, core muscles)—Müller, eventually, added to his bookshelf, writing My System for Ladies and My System for Children. There was also the remedial My Breathing System for those for whom, trapped in a Victorian sartorial nightmare, respiration had to be taught.Mark Anderson, the author of Kafka’s Clothes and a professor of German and comparative literature at Columbia, argues that the author was likely drawn to Müller’s unabashed commentaries on the crush of modern life. (“The town office type is often a sad phenomenon … prematurely bent, with shoulders and hips awry from his dislocating position on the office-stool, pale, with pimply face.”) The system also promised benefits for artists and writers (“geniuses who have no thoughts for their bodies”), and Kafka appears to have shared Müller’s pleasure in the naked body. (Kafka himself did a short stint at a nudist summer colony and often sunbathed nude at home—at least until his tuberculosis caught up with him.)