When Schwarzenegger first moved to the United States in 1968 at age 21, he made a beeline to Venice Beach - or “Muscle Beach,” as it was known - in Los Angeles.
(Schwarzenegger won office and served two terms as California governor, from 2003 through 2011.) Schwarzenegger returned to Graz in 2007 to celebrate Alfred Gerstl’s 84th birthday. Gerstl recounted a story wherein Schwarzenegger and a group of bodybuilders chased a group of neo-Nazis out of Graz. Gerstl came to Schwarzenegger’s defense when the latter, as a gubernatorial candidate in 2003, was accused of being an admirer of Hitler’s. In 1999, Schwarzenegger served as Gerstl’s best man when the widower finally remarried. Schwarzenegger became a frequent guest at the Gerstl home, and the two enjoyed a lifelong bond. Gerstl, who would eventually become president of the upper house of the Austrian parliament, took it upon himself to teach his young charges about the role of Austria in the rise of Nazism and about the dangers of anti-Semitism and fascism. His paternal grandfather was a cantor in Brooklyn. Gerstl himself was the son of a Jewish father and an Austrian Catholic mother who converted to Judaism for their marriage. He always understood the need to protect the weak.” He always wanted to know why we were against the Nazis. He once told an interviewer, “I gathered the young people together for sports, but the condition was they had to listen…. Gerstl’s father, Alfred Gerstl, had been a resistance fighter during the war, and later became a youth sports coach. As a youth, he befriended Karl Gerstl, a medical student and bodybuilder. Schwarzenegger grew up in Thal, a small town of about 2,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Graz, Austria’s second-largest city.
#ARNOLD SWAGGERNAGER HEIGHT SERIES#
It is perhaps then of little surprise that he sought out a series of surrogate father-figures on his way toward becoming the world-famous bodybuilder, actor and politician perhaps it’s not a surprise, either, that Schwarzenegger was drawn to men utterly unlike and even opposed to his father-Schwarzenegger’s mentors were all Jews. In hindsight, Schwarzenegger has described himself as a victim of child abuse. Gustav supposedly harbored doubts that he was even Arnold’s biological father. A police chief and former member of the Nazi party, Gustav was a strict disciplinarian who favored Arnold’s older brother, Meinhard. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who turns 73 on Thursday, July 30, had, at best an ambivalent and, at worst a difficult relationship with his father, Gustav.
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