📍Schwarzenegger Museum, Linakweg 9, 8151 Thal, Styria, Austria
1947 – 1965“Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in July 1947 in Thal, a small village in the green hills just west of Graz, in Styria, Austria, the younger son of Gustav, the local police chief, and Aurelia. The family lived in the official gendarmerie residence, a former forester's house of the Counts of Herberstein, in a modest flat with no running water or refrigerator. Postwar Austria was poor, and his childhood was strict: his father was a disciplinarian who demanded obedience, and Arnold often felt he had to compete with his older brother, Meinhard. He was an active, sporty boy who played football and spent summers swimming in the Thalersee, the little lake near the village. There, as a teenager, he met bodybuilders from Graz who came to swim and train by the lake, and they inspired him. At fifteen he began lifting weights seriously, training in a gym in Graz and at home with dumbbells and a homemade pulley machine fixed to a door frame in the family flat. He pinned pictures of bodybuilders and of America on his bedroom wall and dreamed of going there to become a champion and a film star. After military service in the Austrian army, he left Thal in 1966 for Munich, won Mr Universe at twenty, and moved to America in 1968. He became a bodybuilding legend, a Hollywood star in The Terminator and other films, and later Governor of California. In 2011 his childhood home in Thal opened as a museum, where visitors can see his first dumbbells, his old bed and the training equipment of his youth.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today