It was Jens Breivik. That question would be the start of a career in Norwegian diplomatic missions that would last forty years and take her from London via New Orleans to Ankara and Shanghai. She met Jens again many years later, and this time they got married. That was in 1983. The same year, they ended up in court in Oslo in an attempt to obtain custody of Anders. For some time it actually looked as if the four-year-old might end up with his father and Tove in their diplomatic residence flat in Paris.
Tove looked up at the mirror again.
‘Are you feeling bad?’
‘Don't ask,’ he answered, all grown-up.
‘We're going to Cabourg,’ said Tove. ‘First to McDonald's and then to the beach. OK?’
‘You're really nice, Tove,’ Anders smiled from the back seat.
A Suspicious Smile
‘Anders has become a contact-adverse, slightly anxious, passive child, but with a manic kind of defence, restlessly active and with a feigned, aversive smile […]. It will be very important to take steps at an early stage to prevent the boy developing more serious psychopathology,’ wrote a psychologist from Statens senter for barne- og ungdomspsykiatri [the State Centre for Child and Youth Psychiatry; SSBU] in March 1983, in an application to Barnevernet [the Child Welfare Service] for Anders to be given a foster home.3
The team from the SSBU responsible for reporting on the case were extremely concerned. They were of the opinion that the boy was subject to a deficit of parental care and concluded that he should be taken away from his mother. This was a rare and dramatic recommendation from the SSBU, presented in slightly woolly professional terms. An ‘insufficient care situation’?
The portrait of the four-year-old with a ‘feigned, aversive smile’ dates from around the same time that Jens and Tove got married in London. In this period, Jens also received telephone calls from Oslo.4 It was his ex-wife's neighbours, who told him they had heard noises from her flat, and that the little boy and his half-sister were often home alone in the evenings. Something was wrong in the small family, which from the outside did not appear particularly unusuaclass="underline" a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties with two timid, blond children.
Anders Behring Breivik was born in Oslo on 13 February 1979 and moved to London as a baby. His father, Jens Breivik, was originally from northern Norway and came ‘from a strict background with little communication in the family’.5 He trained in business administration and economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen and became a diplomat.
Anders' mother, Wenche Behring, was a thirty-three-year-old auxiliary nurse from Kragerø in Telemark. They appeared to be a typical couple of the generation of 1968: a social climber from northern Norway who had made it all the way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thanks to the revolution in education, and his princess from southern Norway. Both of them were incomers to Oslo with no close family in the area and, in a way, were true children of the post-war Labour Party state's social mobility and opportunities. As a diplomat, Jens Breivik served governments of both socialist and conservative persuasions, but he was an ardent Labour Party man himself.6 The couple both had children from previous relationships; Jens had two sons and a daughter, while Wenche had a six-year-old daughter.
The marriage between Jens and Wenche was short-lived. Anders' parents separated when he was one and a half, and his mother moved back to Norway together with her two children, taking up residence in Jens Breivik's ministerial accommodation in Fritzners Gate, a short street just behind Frogner Church. Wenche saw her ex-husband as a monster, a ‘devil’ incarnate,7 while he thought that she was ‘mad’ and impossible to talk with.8
The conflict did not end with their separation, and, in the years that followed, the little boy became a battlefield for his parents and eventually an apple of discord. Jens saw little of his son over the next few years, even when he was in Oslo, but he tried to support him and his ex-wife financially.
When Anders was two years old, in the summer of 1981, Wenche contacted the social care office to ask for help. She explained that she did not have any family or social network in Oslo, she was physically and mentally worn out, and she thought that Anders was a demanding child, ‘restless and lately more and more violent, capricious and full of unpredictable quirks’. She often worked double shifts, she said, and took many night shifts to make ends meet. She asked for weekend respite care for Anders.
The application was granted a few months later, but the arrangement did not work well, and Wenche ended it because ‘the home did not suit Anders’. The respite care family reacted badly to the mother, according to the SSBU report, seeing her as strange and difficult. They told the social care office of bizarre incidents.9
But this was only the beginning of an acutely difficult home situation. The relationship between Anders and his mother was full of violent conflicts and tearful reconciliations. Wenche was apparently quite unstable. She could be furious with the little boy one moment, only to shower him with affection immediately afterwards. ‘Double communication’ was how the SSBU later characterized it: she pushed the boy away and pulled him towards her in a way that was extremely confusing for him.
It seemed as if Anders was paying dearly for the difficult relationship between his parents: his mother took sides with his big sister and attacked Anders.10 She treated him as if he were an extension of the despised Jens.11 Even if the boy was neither mentally nor physically disabled, was he perhaps a demanding child after all? It was as if he had an unquenchable thirst. His mother was concerned about how he would gulp down his red fruit-juice drink and wondered whether he might be diabetic. She felt provoked by his smile, which she saw as inappropriate, condescending and disdainful. Since Anders was only three years old, disdainful and condescending were strange adjectives to use, but Wenche's frustration about the difficult connection with her son was maybe not just down to her alone.
In the autumn of 1982, Wenche and her children moved into a modern flat with five rooms in the Nedre Silkestrå housing co-operative. Jens had lent a hand with the deposit, perhaps quietly hoping that more spacious and pleasant surroundings might help to calm the situation. The family was in contact with the family welfare centre in Christies Gate several times, where they were especially concerned about Anders, as they believed that ‘in emergency situations it would be tremendously difficult for the mother to deal with’ her son. The mother described her three-year-old boy as ‘aggressive, clingy and hyperactive’.
In early 1983, she contacted the family welfare centre again and was referred to the SSBU at Gaustad, where the small family was admitted for observation in the day unit for all of three weeks in February 1983. When they arrived, Wenche appeared disorientated, demanding and suspicious. She could not find the way up the hill from Gaustad, even though there was really only one road to take. She was preoccupied with money and demanded that the SSBU pay for taxis for her and her children throughout the rest of their stay. A team of eight people, including a psychologist and a senior consultant in psychiatry, observed how the family functioned together and how they functioned alone in other contexts.
Anders spent his fourth birthday with the SSBU. He was tested in many contexts and, among other things, spent a number of sessions in the supervised playroom. He went into a room with a sandbox, as well as boxes containing various toys, dolls and a drawing table. Against the wall was the ‘world in a cupboard’, a cupboard with many different little figures of animals and people, including people from different nations, soldiers and Indians. Through play, the boy would act out his inner world and show what he was thinking about while at the same time demonstrating how he related to the observer who was with him. Normally, children would find their way to the toys that interested them, take them over to the sandbox and play with them. All the toys made it possible for children to depict conflicts and situations that might characterize their own lives. But, over the course of the sessions Anders spent in the playroom, not much happened. Some of the time he would sit passively among all the toys. Other times he would wander about restlessly. He kept his distance from the specialist who was in the room with him.