I was happy to learn in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that someone dedicated a book to one of the original German somatic practitioners Carola Spitz.
Christoph Ribbat‘s homage to Carola Spitz is called „Die Atemlehrerin“ („The breath teacher“). Unfortunately it is only available in German but we can learn about Carola Spitz’s teaching in her book Ways to Better Breathing.
Here I‘ve pieced together a loosely translated summary of the book review for “Die Atemleherin” by Johan Schloemann.
„The techniques of mindfulness – a positive, concentrated sensing of the self for the wellbeing of body and mind – do not only originate from a commercialized Buddhism in the US. They were also imported by two Jewish emigrants from Berlin who‘d both been students of the German gymnastic teacher Elsa Gindler. Their names were Charlotte Selver and Carola Spitz (who, once in the US changed her surname to Speads for easier pronunciation).
Charlotte Selver and Carola Speads had been part of the gymnastic boom since the turn of the 20th century which saw itself as an antidote to big-city fatigue and the damages of civilization in the traumatic aftermath of the First World War. On the one hand, these body-mind connection teachers, mostly women, were sought and respected, on the other, they were belittled as provincial and weird and given the derisive nickname „aether bitches” (“Ätherziegen”; the German equivalent of “bitch” being a “goat”).
Without her breath teaching, Carola Speads was convinced, she would not have been able to deal with the terrible situation in Germany in the 30s and her escape to the US, nor would she have continued offering lessons to her students in New York after she‘d suffered a stroke.
„The experience of the breath will make you open to life.“, she said and thus dedicated herself to offering breath courses „to all who yearn to breathe freely“.”