Stop Them with Spirit
Utøya is about fixing things that are falling apart, that suddenly go wrong, stop working or simply do not turn up. There are holes in the tents that must be mended, cold water in the showers and rice that must be cooked if the potatoes are finished. Utøya is about always being prepared. Utøya is about improvising. In that respect, Utøya is not only a paradise or every utopian young socialist's wet dream, but also training in the ideas that characterize the mother party: problem solving, the will to govern and pragmatism.
The memories had begun to fade of the time when the AUF was an action group, with members who had travelled round the countryside in the thirties to beat up the paramilitaries of Nasjonal Samling [National Unity], the fascist party founded by Vidkun Quisling, and who had participated in all sections of the resistance movement during the war. Sixty-five years of peace and prosperity had made both Norwegians and AUF members into people with ‘many friends in common, and no enemies’,4 as the author Erlend Loe put it.
In spite of the tough leadership struggle in the autumn of 2010, when Eskil Pedersen beat Åsmund Aukrust in the ballot, with 175 against 173 votes, it was a harmonious and calm group of two young women and two young men who led the AUF. It might almost seem that Utøya was too good to be true.
Drinking?
‘No, practically none at all,’ said Anne-Berit Stavenes, the leader of the Norwegian People's Aid team on Utøya.
Fighting?
‘No, not here. Utøya is a paradise. The week we spend on the island is a holiday for us too.’
At about ten o’clock in the morning on 22 July 2011, the AUF published a report on its website about the new memorial at Utøya. Ida and Eskil Pedersen had taken part in the unveiling two days earlier. A modest plaque had been screwed into the trunk of a birch tree straight across from the kiosk at the Café Building. The text was almost invisible when the sun shone on the bright metal, but in the rain and mist on Friday 22 July the letters stood out like dark cracks on the smooth façade. The sparse text honoured the memory of ‘the AUF members who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9’, listing the names of four young men from Lørenskog, Trondheim, Førde and Kabelvåg who were killed in Spain in 1937 and 1938.
Martin Schei, from Førde in western Norway, was only eighteen years old when he left an AUF course on Utøya and – without saying goodbye to his parents or family, and contrary to the mother party's line of neutrality – set off for the recruitment office in Paris. In Spain, he joined the Spanish government forces in the fight against Franco's rebel army. He fell a few months later in September 1937, during the Aragon Offensive. Schei reached the age of nineteen. Beneath the names of the fallen are some lines from Nordahl Grieg's 1936 poem ‘Til ungdommen’ [literally, ‘To the youth’]: ‘The grenades roll silently / on conveyor belts. / Stop their drift towards death, / stop them with spirit!’5
From land, Utøya has many faces, depending on the season, the weather and from where it is observed. Sometimes the island looms in the rain like a dark secret on the leaden grey waters of the fjord. At other times, it can only vaguely be seen as a mirage in the mist, a glimpse of something dark revealing itself and disappearing so quickly that from land you are left wondering if you really did see something out there.
For most people, the island was just a fleeting flash of green down in the massive Tyrifjord, which thousands of commuters drove past on weekdays and tens of thousands of tourists from Oslo went past at weekends on their way up to their cabins in the mountains. During the daytime, the rushing sound of the E16 road could be heard out across the fjord, but, at night-time, all that could be heard on Utøya was the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees. Except when the summer camp was on.
The quiet guests at the campsite on the other side of the water from Utøya did not associate the AUF with calm and objective political discussion but with a smörgåsbord of noise: cheering from the football pitch, roaring music from the stage and the rock tent, often through the night, screaming and yelling from the teenagers in the water. The noise died down in the wee hours of the morning and was a little less loud when it rained, but otherwise the young ones kept going throughout that whole week in July.
Notes
All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.
1 2083, p. 854.
2 Jonas Gahr Støre, ‘Urolige tider’ [Uneasy times], Bergens Tidende, 21 July 2011, www.bt.no/meninger/kommentar/Urolige-tider-2540395.html.
3 Ibid.
4 Erlend Loe, L (Oslo: Cappelen, 1999), p. 23.
5 Nordahl Grieg, ‘Til ungdommen’ [To the youth], in Samlede dikt (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2011), pp. 138–9.
5
Morg the Graffiti Bomber1
Anders Behring Breivik's Youth
King of the Number 32 Bus
Morg, Spok and Mono squeezed up against the wooden fence. The three fourteen-year-olds in dark clothing gave the occasional cautious glance over the side. Night descended over Skøyen bus depot, but the watchmen were still in the area. The boys had sneaked away from home at around midnight and fetched their spray cans, mostly nicked from the shelves of nearby petrol stations. If a can cost 90 kroner and you needed at least five cans to spray a piece, it goes without saying that tagging could quickly turn into an expensive hobby.
Mono was tense. If they were caught, all hell would break loose. Not only would they get a bawling from their parents or be grounded: there were rumours of watchmen who beat up taggers. Muscle-bound hunks who broke boys' arms and noses. Their boss was a former foreign legionnaire with a photographic memory. Oslo's most notorious security guard. He knew the names behind every tag and gave the boys two chances. If you were caught a third time, you would get a beating. At night-time, it was full-blown guerrilla warfare along the tracks and concrete platforms of Oslo Sporveier [Oslo Public Transport Administration]. But at Skøyen bus depot it was the three taggers who had their eyes on the watchmen, not the other way round.
Mono was not a particularly experienced tagger but, unless you were a total nerd or a complete snob, most people went out at some point to have a go. It bothered Mono that his tags looked so bad. Had he not practised enough? The other lads drew sketches during lessons and drafted larger pieces in their bedrooms, painstakingly made, often intricate and very colourful street murals. Spok and Morg were quite experienced. Morg spent many hours painting a piece in a pedestrian subway under the ring road up by the Radium Hospital. The colourful piece was still burning on the cold concrete wall for a long time afterwards.
For the big boys, though, it was not a question of colours or pieces in godforsaken holes half-way to Bærum. ‘Put your name on the train’: they had to put their tag – in other words, their nickname or brand – somewhere it would be easily visible, where it was difficult to get to and where you would get some cred. ‘Rockin' it’. Many of the West End taggers were, or became, skilful artists, but aesthetics were not the most important thing for these fourteen-year-olds. Excitement, joining the big boys at their game and being seen by the population of Oslo: that was what it was about.