ver since he was a boy, Kafka had harboured insecurities about his body.

Back then, trips to the

swimming baths could be ruined by the sight of his father Hermann’s imposing physique. Kafka’s self-
image was confirmed when, as a young man, he was spared military service ‘on account of weakness’.

‘I am the thinnest person I know,’ he told Felice a few years later. That was saying something, he added,
for he was ‘no stranger to sanatoria’. In a moment of optimism, Kafka once bought Strength and How to
Obtain It (1897) by Eugen Sandow, the founder of modern bodybuilding. Sandow was a source of
encouragement to skinny and dumpy males across the continent, with a readership that included
Fernando Pessoa, W B Yeats and T S Eliot.

Throughout his life, Kafka was seduced by a variety of different teachers and ideologies of wellbeing. At
times, he subsisted off only nuts and berries. He chewed each mouthful of food for several minutes,
according to the instructions of one Horace Fletcher. On advice from several disreputable authorities,
Kafka went about the cold Prague winter in shirtsleeves, hoping to acquire natural immunity to disease,
and he refused to heat his bedroom.

But it was the holistic regime of the Danish fitness guru Jørgen Peter Müller that truly resonated with
Kafka. Müller is poorly remembered now, but in the early part of the 20th century he was a global
celebrity. His bestselling book was My System: 15 Minutes’ Work a Day for Health’s Sake (1904), a copy
of which Kafka kept open at his bedside. My own copy is a reissue from the 1930s, by which time Müller
could boast of having sold 1.5 million books, in 26 languages, while having gained the patronage of the
Prince of Wales. By 1912, Müller was able to relocate to London, where he opened a high-class fitness
institute, first near Piccadilly and then in Trafalgar Square (the building is now home to a Waterstones
bookshop).

Most important of all were cleanliness and purity: windows were kept open to disperse ‘pestilential
vapours’

Müller was an unlikely role model for Kafka. A pioneer of the modern publicity stunt, he once had a
volunteer pull a wheelbarrow full of rocks across his stomach in front of a large crowd. In photographs,
he is frequently depicted skiing in his underwear or else submerged in frozen lakes. Müller’s ‘system’
comprised a series of exercises that were mostly aimed at strengthening the abdominal muscles, as well
as advice covering virtually every aspect of physical health. Kafka began ‘Müllerising’ (as it was called)
sometime around 1910, and followed it for the best part of a decade.

Müller disdained those who believed that ‘sickly looks are an infallible index of an aesthetic and soulful
nature’. In fact, Müller directly addressed himself to ‘Literary and Scientific Men and Artists’, urging
those who occupy the ‘higher spheres’ not to neglect their physical bodies. In seeming contradiction
with the deliberate cultivation of a neurasthenic persona, Kafka also internalised Müller’s message. ‘My
mode of life is devised solely for … fitting in better with my writing,’ he told Felice early on in their
relationship, as he explained the rationale behind his Müllerising: ‘time is short, my strength is limited,
the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then
one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.’

According to Müller, physical strength was only one aspect of a