Arnie 'most famous Austrian since Mozart'
California’s new governor has a classic local-boy-makes-good history of rising from humble beginnings to achieve stardom and political power.
From unremarkable beginnings in a tranquil Austrian farming village, Arnold Schwarzenegger turned himself into the world’s greatest bodybuilder and Hollywood’s biggest action star before being elected as governor of America’s most populated state.
In the farming village of Thal in southern Austria where he grew up, Schwarzenegger is admired mostly just for being a local boy who made it big in America – and not so much for his political views or his films.
Local media dub him the most famous Austrian since Mozart.
“His life is like a fairy tale,” Franz Hoermann, 56, a former classmate of Schwarzenegger’s, said over a beer in a Thal restaurant, where the walls feature photos of Schwarzenegger.
“His only flaw,” joked Karl Kling, 48, the restaurant’s owner who also grew up with Schwarzenegger, “is that he is a Republican.”
Schwarzenegger, 56, was born in 1947 and grew up in a two-storey house just uphill from a lake where he and other kids passed their time swimming and ice-skating.
Young Arnold was the son of Gustav, a police officer and a volunteer Nazi member, and Aurelia Schwarzenegger.
A harsh disciplinarian who drank heavily, Gustav never spoke about his past support for Hitler to his two sons – Schwarzenegger had an older brother who died in a car crash.
In Thal, as elsewhere in Austria, the Hitler era for decades remained a topic shrouded in silence and children almost never asked their fathers what they had done during the war.
Schwarzenegger, who left Austria 35 years ago and became a US citizen in 1984, is remembered in Thal as a reserved boy who was obsessed from an early age with developing his muscles.
He would do pull-ups and other exercises from an iron bar erected between two trees and then, at age 15, he began bodybuilding at a gym in nearby Graz.
“His only interest was in shaping his body in hopes of one day becoming Mr. Universe,” his first trainer, Kurt Marnul, said. ”His ambition was so great.”
He first captured that title at 20, only a year after leaving his boyhood home for good. He ended up winning a total of 13 championship titles, including Mr Universe, Mr Olympia and Mr World, before entering show business.
“He in an extraordinary person – he came from a modest family with a simple education and made something unbelievable out of himself,” said Heinz Anderwald, who now lives in the former Schwarzenegger family house in Thal.
