THAL, Austria — The contradictory history of Arnold Schwarzenegger begins here, near the leafy shores of the green lake called Thalersee.
Up the hillside stands the two-story house where Schwarzenegger was born to a local police chief and former Nazi, Gustav, and his wife, Aurelia. It was 1947, two years after the end of World War II, and Austrians had not recovered from the horrors of the era. They also had not reconciled themselves to their nation's own dark role -- nor would they for decades to come.
A young Arnold swam in the lake and, with other boys, did chin-ups on a masterful oak tree whose branches hung over the water.
Among the scrawny boys -- Arnold towered over most of them -- was Karl Gerstl, from the adjacent town of Graz, whose friendship would prove crucial. Karl's father, Alfred, a Jew, took Arnold under his wing and, by many accounts, was an important force in molding his life, thoughts and early career.
That Gustav Schwarzenegger had served a regime dedicated to killing Jews, while his son's mentor was a Jew who had fled that regime and battled it from the underground, is typical of the contradictions that ricochet through the lush, gentle hills of southern Austria.
In the Austria where Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up, a culture of denial thrived for many years after the war. Austrians lagged well behind the Germans in acknowledging their role in the war and in the persecution of Jews; the country of Hitler's birth preferred to think of itself as the Nazi leader's first victim, not his enthusiastic accomplice.
The province of Styria, where Graz and Thal sit side by side, was known for a deep strain of centuries-old anti-Semitism. Jews were evicted from the area in 1497 and banned for the next 350 years. The lone synagogue in Graz was destroyed in 1938; it wasn't rebuilt until 2000.
Alfred Gerstl, the man who would mentor Schwarzenegger, was born between the two world wars, the son of a Jewish father, with a grandfather who was a cantor in Brooklyn, and an Austrian Catholic mother who converted to Judaism for her wedding.
Gerstl would eventually become president of the upper house of the Austrian parliament, but in the late 1950s and throughout the '60s, he ran a club for student athletes in Graz.
Gerstl said he took it upon himself to teach the young men, Schwarzenegger among them, about a history his country was denying and about the dangers of anti-Semitism and fascism.
