Wilfred ‘Little Lord’ Sagen is the ultimate West End character in Norwegian literature. De mørke kilder [The dark sources] was the title chosen by Johan Borgen for his 1956 novel depicting this Norwegian Nazi. Wilfred grew up in a rich man's home where he apparently lacked nothing, apart from one thing. His father committed suicide when Wilfred was young, and even though the Little Lord has the perfect exterior, there is darkness within him. He has to be the best at everything. He plays the role of a polite, affable and promising young pillar of society with great talents, but in the evenings he sneaks out.
The gifted young pianist is a gang leader. Since he does not have any real heart or personality, only playing roles, he never grows up and never becomes an individual. Instead, he is split, or doubled, to borrow terms from psychoanalysis. The Little Lord re-emerges at night as a brutal pack animal. He beats up an old Jew and ends up being robbed by two working-class lads while on a drinking spree in the East End's Grünerløkka, in what is probably the first literary depiction of child thieves in Oslo. Borgen describes this Norwegian Nazi as the result not only of a split consciousness but also of a split city: the East End and West End are like night and day.
The psychological fall down into the abyss of Nazism has its sociological response in the fear of being declassed. The potential comedown hangs over the young Sagen heir like a sword of Damocles, and Nazism is his solution. The Little Lord's exploits in Grünerløkka took place almost a hundred years ago, but the city is still split today if you look at election results and research into living conditions. In the West End, life expectancy is longer, income is higher, the constituents are whiter and the election results are a deeper shade of blue – in other words, more conservative.
On an August day in 1986, Anders stood with his satchel on his back at Smestad Primary School. It was his first day, and, as he peered up at the large, yellow, brick building, he may have known that both King Harald and his son, Crown Prince Haakon Magnus, had been pupils there when they were young princes. Although Anders appeared to be a normal, happy boy who was good at school, according to his step-mother Tove he would later resent school. Like many of the children of parents from the 1968 generation, Anders was critical of what he regarded as their legacy. A shadow fell over his school years, but it is difficult to say whether that was in the late eighties or later.
At Smestad, as he later wrote, Anders remembered ‘being forced to complete mandatory knitting and sewing courses’:
These courses were first implemented in various Western European countries as a result of Marxist revolution which started all the way back in the 1930s but had its climax around 1968. These mandatory knitting and sewing courses were implemented with the goal of deliberately contribute [sic] to feminise European boys in their insane quest to attempt to create the Marxist utopia consisting of ‘true equality between the sexes’. I remember I dreaded these courses as it felt very unnatural and was a complete waste of time.24
As it appeared to Anders later, or at least as he described it in his compendium, there were many things that were the fault of the so-called ’68ers.
The meticulous young boy, who knew about clothes and colour combinations from an early age and who lived with his mum and big sister, later felt that he had been ‘feminized’, as if he had been contaminated by effeminacy, softness and feelings. He saw a connection between the ’68ers and decay not only at school or for the European man, but also with regard to morality and sexuality.
‘An alarming number of young girls in Oslo, Norway start giving oral sex from the age of 11 to 12,’25 he wrote – in other words, while they were still at primary school, which in Norway lasts until the age of thirteen. ‘I feel shame on behalf of my city, my country and my civilisation. I loathe the post war conservatives for not being able to halt the Marxist Cultural Revolution manifested through the ’68 generation.’26 Although he viewed his childhood through blurry lenses and the factual basis of his assessment is dubious, the consequences for him – ‘shame’ and ‘loathing’ – could be just as real.
Breivik, a child of ’68er parents, felt shame and loathing towards the thought of the Norway constructed by the generation of 1968, and the Norway towards which he later expressed such hatred was described largely as a gendered being: as a woman – emotional, unstable, promiscuous. Was this perhaps the nightmare vision of his own worn-out mother in the early eighties?
As I gradually went deeper into Breivik's compendium, I came closer to his own upbringing. The most emotionally charged sections deal with his anger and frustration towards women generally and his mother in particular. Breivik described how the decay caused by the ’68ers had affected his own family. Both his mother and his father were apparently ’68ers. His mother was also a feminist, he thought. ‘I have had a privileged upbringing with responsible and intelligent people around me,’ Breivik wrote, while at the same time having a bad word to say about all of them. The army officer who was his mother's partner while Breivik was a teenager was ‘likeable’, but also ‘a very primitive sexual beast’.27
As for his mother and his sister, he left no stone unturned in describing how the moral decay let loose by the ’68ers had influenced their behaviour and health. In a harangue about sexual morality and sexually transmitted diseases, he brought them in, describing their sex lives and subsequent health problems. He concluded by saying that his mother and sister ‘have not only shamed me but they have shamed themselves and our family. A family that was broken in the first place due to secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution.’28
Parents' sins are visited upon their children. The description of his family is personal and brutal, written in a kind of moral rage. He was also a victim of moral deterioration, he thought, since his mother and sister had brought shame on him.
What according to Anders was a normal middle-class background emerges at the same time as a complicated family picture characterized by constant ruptures and great distances. The 1968 generation's concept of a ‘fragmented family’ is present to an almost caricatured degree: Breivik grew up in a maelstrom of half-siblings, ex-step-parents and various families with which he was half-connected. Tove was concerned about this aspect of his upbringing. It would be hard for any child, and it was remarkable that Anders took it so well.
‘One day Jens will be proud of me,’ said Anders, who always thought positively.
Strangely enough, the only one of Anders' close relatives who gets away more or less scot-free from the fury of the compendium is his father. ‘The thing is that he is just not very good with people,’ Anders wrote apologetically. But the reality was that Jens Breivik left his son to his own devices, especially after he separated from Tove. Throughout his upbringing, Anders’ step-mother emerges as his only normal adult point of reference. It was when she came into his father's life that Jens took the initiative to seek custody of his son and, later, to spend time with him. When she disappeared, his relationship with his teenage son also came to an end. Jens broke off contact, which he later blamed on Anders. But Tove, who met up with Anders and with his half-siblings, understood some of the children's resentment towards Jens. They tried contacting him but were rejected. Jens Breivik was a distant and absent father. And this was a source of conflict, not just between Jens and his children, but also in Jens and Tove's life together.
The Cats of Ayia Napa
There was a squeak – a peculiar, raspy sound that appeared to be coming from somewhere far away, yet at the same time nearby. Tove was wide awake now, and blinked in the darkness of the hotel room. She heard Anders moving in the other bed. He was awake too. Tove switched on the bedside light, and there was that squeaking yet again. There was no question: the sound was coming from somewhere in their room. Tove and Anders looked at each other.