Professor Attila

2 July 1844 – 15 March 1924 · Karlsruhe, Baden → New York City

Louis Durlacher — performing and teaching as Professor Attila — was the central pedagogue of the late-nineteenth-century strongman tradition. He taught Eugen Sandow in Brussels in 1887, ran instructional studios in London, Brussels, and New York, and is the figure through whom the bent press and the "anyhow" lifts entered the English-speaking music-hall repertoire.

Origins

Durlacher was born in Karlsruhe, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, in July 1844. He took the stage name Attila in his twenties and performed across the German and Austrian variety circuits through the 1860s and 1870s before moving to Brussels in the 1880s. The Brussels studio is where his pedagogical career began in earnest: he taught a small succession of pupils in private lessons, of whom Sandow — then Friedrich Müller, an unknown circus performer — was the one whose career would establish Attila's name.

The work

Attila trained Sandow through the latter half of 1887 and into 1888, taught him the bent press, drilled him on the music-hall presentation of strength, and arranged the public challenge to Charles Sampson at the Royal Aquarium in London on 2 November 1889 that launched Sandow's career (see Feats). Attila opened a London studio shortly afterwards, then transferred operations to New York in 1894, where he established Attila's Studio on West 10th Street. The studio was the senior strength gymnasium in New York for the next three decades and was attended at various times by Theodore Roosevelt, by the actor and lifter Sandow himself on his American tours, and by a long succession of vaudeville and stage clients.

Attila's competitive lifting career, as distinct from his teaching, is less documented. He performed as a stage strongman on the European circuit through the 1870s and 1880s and is known to have demonstrated the bent press at moderate weights into his fifties; he was never the strongest man of his generation, and he did not present himself as such.

"The pupil makes the teacher, in the long run. I have made the man you came to see."

Notable contributions

Attila's significance is methodological rather than statistical. The contributions most consistently attributed to him in the historical literature are:

• Teaching the bent press as the central one-arm overhead lift of the music-hall era. Whether he originated the lift is contested; that he was the principal teacher of it is firm.
• Designing — or commissioning — the hollow shot-loaded dumbbell that became the standard variable-load implement of the 1880s and 1890s, before Calvert's plate-loaded designs.
• Training Sandow, Sigmund Klein's predecessor (Attila's daughter Grace), and the American strongman Warren Lincoln Travis among others.
• Establishing the studio model — a teaching gymnasium that combined private instruction, equipment sales, and stage placement — that was widely copied across the United States and Britain in the 1900s.

Method

Attila left no training book under his own name. The pedagogical content of his teaching survives indirectly, through Sandow's Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) and Klein's later writing. The method emphasised slow progressive loading on a small set of compound exercises — the bent press, the one-arm clean, the two-hands continental — careful technique under low repetitions, and a great deal of attention to posture and stage presentation. Sandow's later programme of light dumbbell drill, by which his name is now most associated, was a departure from rather than a continuation of Attila's teaching.

Legacy

Attila's New York studio passed, after his death in March 1924, to his widow and his daughter Grace Attila. Sigmund Klein, who married Grace later that year, took over the operation and renamed it Klein's Gym. The continuity from Attila's Studio to Klein's Gym is direct in custody if not in branding, and meant that the line of teaching descent ran from Attila through Klein to a substantial portion of mid-century American lifting. The fall-out from this is that almost every twentieth-century American lifter who can claim a teaching genealogy traces it, within three or four steps, to Attila.

The bent press fell out of competitive lifting in the 1930s, and with it the surface continuity of Attila's specific contributions. The deeper continuity — the teaching gymnasium as an institution — survived.

Disputed and unresolved

The claim that Attila invented the bent press is repeated in older sources and is not safe. The lift existed in some form in continental strongman acts of the 1870s; Attila's contribution was to systematise and teach it, not to originate it. The claim that he taught Theodore Roosevelt is documented in studio records but the extent of the teaching (occasional sessions versus regular instruction) is contested.

His birth year is sometimes given as 1842 or 1845 in older sources; the 1844 figure used here follows Chapman's research in Sandow the Magnificent.