According to Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero, Hubertus Joseph Pilates was born into a typical German working-class family in the small town of Mönchengladbach. His father was a locksmith, his mother a housewife. The family moved from apartment to apartment, always in the same neighborhood, whenever they were unable to scratch up enough money for the rent. The elder Pilates obtained a membership at the local turnverein, or community health club—a great German invention—and soon his firstborn son, who was weakly and asthmatic, was training compulsively there. Josef, as he liked to call himself until he immigrated to the US, worked for some time as a brewer in the local beer factory. He married, had a child, became a widower, married again and had another child, and displayed a strange ability to move between worlds.
In 1913 or so, looking for opportunity and sensing his country’s gradual collapse into war, he moved to London. It would appear that he did some boxing there and also performed what was then a popular circus act, dusting himself with flour and striking “Greek poses” to show off his muscled physique. This adventure lasted six months. He spent the war years on the Isle of Man in an overcrowded and sordid internment camp.
Pilates may or may not have saved thousands of his fellow prisoners from the Spanish flu, as he claimed. Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero point out that the absence of flu in the camp was more likely owing to its remoteness. There is no question, though, that Pilates was already thinking about machine-aided exercise during that time. Back in Germany after the war he tried to find success, first in staged boxing exhibitions and then as a match promoter. Simultaneously he started identifying himself as a Heilkundiger, which Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero translate as an “expert in the science of natural healing,” and he landed a job as a physical education instructor with the Hanover police.
Meanwhile, he was busy designing strange little apparatuses—a metal hoop with inner leather rests for the hands or feet that he called a Magic Circle; the Wunda Chair, with a pedal supported by springs; the Reformer, a movable bed, or platform, attached by means of leather straps to a low steel frame—and applying for patents for each one in Germany and then in the United States, Great Britain, and France. According to Pérez Pont and Aparicio Romero, the choreographer and movement notator Rudolf Laban came to his studio and was impressed. So was the avant-garde choreographer Mary Wigman, maybe. Pilates saved a little money and traveled to the United States, where he visited a brother and an uncle who had immigrated to Nebraska. In the mid-1920s, when it was clear to him that Germany was headed for a second economic and political collapse, he left behind his German life—wife, children, police academy gig, arty connections—and boarded a ship to New York. Mid-Atlantic he met a frail nurse named Clara, who became his helpmeet and lifelong companion. They had no children, but for a few years one of his nieces, Mary, came to New York and trained with him.