Arnold Schwarzenegger on His ‘Abusive’ Father, 'Complicated' Childhood: ‘Could Have Broken My Spirit’ (Exclusive Excerpt)

Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a point of telling his children how he feels. “I love you,” he’ll write on Instagram, marking their birthdays. “I’m proud of you.” 

"I would say that I’m really well-bonded with my kids," Schwarzenegger tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. 

But such affirmations were nonexistent from his own father growing up in the remote town of Thal, Austria. His father, who fought with the Nazis in WWII, became an alcoholic prone to violence in the war's aftermath, striking Arnold, his brother and mother. 

“My father had a hot-and-cold-shower kind of a treatment,” says Schwarzenegger. “When he was drunk, he was not forthcoming with his emotions. He was angry. And when he was not—two, three days later, he would maybe feel guilty and buy us ice cream and take us out, hugging, kissing and all that stuff.”

But there was one constant: Throughout the star's childhood, his father’s motto was simple: “Be useful.” It’s one the former governor has lived by (albeit on his own terms) and co-opted for his new motivational book: Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, out Oct. 10 from Penguin Press, which distills some of his greatest life lessons.

Be useful, “was the very phrase that motivated me,” the Terminator star says.

Despite his adopting the phrase, he doesn't consider this new book closure with his father, who died in 1972. “I was never looking for closure. I'm not into all this stuff. Because I never really blamed my father for anything. I never ran around and said, 'It's my father's fault.' It's nobody's fault.”

“I have always fond memories of my dad, and I always will have fond memories of my dad. And I don't blame him for anything, simply because he did not know any better. He was beaten when he was a kid. It was just a tradition. And then he was forced into [WWII], and was misled,” says Schwarzenegger, who released a video strongly denouncing anti-Semitism this year. (Hate "is the path of the weak," he said in the speech.) 

Today he adds: “I felt that my father loved me, because I could tell by the way he held me. I learned how to feel those things rather than to hear those things."

Here, in an exclusive excerpt from “Be Useful,” the star opens up about his difficult childhood growing up in the small town of Thal, Austria, and how he ultimately used the experience as fuel to build a life of global superstardom.

None of us has a choice about where we come from. I grew up in a small village in Austria at the beginning of the Cold War. My mother was very loving. My father was strict, and he could be physically abusive, but I loved him very much. It was complicated. 

I think a lot about how different my life could have been if I wasn’t a positive person, if I’d responded differently to my upbringing in Thal. I didn’t have a hot shower or regular meat in my diet until l left for the army as a teenager. My daily morning routine involved fetching water and chopping firewood, which was brutal in the wintertime and earned me exactly zero sympathy from my father, who’d been through much worse when he was a kid. There were no free passes in Gustav Schwarzenegger’s house. No free meals either. I had to do two hundred knee bends every morning just to “earn” my breakfast. Nothing works up an appetite like bobbing up and down like a pogo stick on an empty stomach. 

The drudgery of all that discomfort and thankless labor could have broken my spirit or made the images of America that I saw in magazines and newsreels seem impossibly far away. It could have drubbed the instinct to look over the horizon out of me. I certainly wasn’t getting any encouragement at home to think about life beyond the hills of southeastern Austria. There was a good job with the police waiting for me when I got out of the army. Others should be so lucky, my father thought. He also didn’t understand or approve of my interest in bodybuilding. He thought it was egotistical and selfish. “Why don’t you chop some wood instead,” he would say, “you can get big and strong that way and at least then you will have done something for somebody else.” Then there were the times he would come home drunk after work and hit us. Those nights were very hard.

I could very easily have allowed myself to get wrapped up in all that, but I chose to look at the positive. I have always made that choice—to recognize that on the vast majority of days my father was a good dad and my mother was the best mom. That life wasn’t exciting or particularly comfortable, not by modern standards anyway, but it was a good life. A life where I learned a lot and I found my passion, my purpose, and my first mentors. 

Even with the undeniably bad things, I choose to remember that they were a big part of what drove me to escape, to achieve, to become the person I am today. If my childhood was just a little bit better, you might not be holding this book right now. And if it was a little bit worse, you might not be holding it either, because I could have fallen down the same rabbit hole of alcoholism that my brother fell down, which eventually cost him his life in a drunk-driving accident in 1971. I owe a lot to my upbringing. I was made for it and made by it. 

From BE USEFUL: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger, to be published on October 10th, 2023 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright(c) 2023 by Fitness Publications, Inc.