‘I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else's importance, someone else's success,’ said Mark David Chapman after having killed John Lennon in 1980.20 ‘I was “Mr Nobody” until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.’ Before the killing, he had boasted to a girl he was chatting up: ‘Something is going to happen soon. You're going to hear about me.’21 Previously, he had told his wife that he was made to be famous, and that he was meant ‘to be someone big’. During his court case, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. The psychiatrists were of the opinion that he suffered from delusions of grandeur and also had a narcissistic personality disorder causing him to seek attention and fame to an abnormal degree.
Narcissism also seems to have affected Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was an assistant professor of mathematics at Berkeley who retreated to a cabin in the woods of Montana and sent out letter bombs. Even though he was also diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, he was found sane and sentenced to prison for killing three people in connection with sixteen separate attacks between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski wrote a manifesto that was published in the New York Times and Washington Post (in exchange for a promise to end his terrorist campaign), in which he gave voice to a kind of extreme right-wing ideology.
Kaczynski was opposed to modern society, especially to science and cold rationality. He described a conspiracy of ‘leftist’ forces consisting of communists and socialists, as well as feminists, minorities, homosexual people and ‘political correctness’ generally. He was motivated by revenge, he said, and sent bombs primarily to other academics. Apart from his ideological motives, Kaczynski's desire for attention and recognition was based on the fact he saw himself as ‘someone special’, someone more important than other people.22 Kaczynski was characterized by his feeling of being a chosen individual, ‘superior’ to other people, and this suggested a possible narcissistic personality disorder.
According to Sigmund Freud, narcissism is connected to the child–mother relationship, an insecurity about one's own identity caused by the infant's separation from its mother being so traumatic that the child tries to re-create the original, symbiotic relationship. Psychoanalysts after Freud describe a narcissistic stage that young children must go through in order to construct a normal sense of self. Narcissism is a necessary starting point on the way towards a stable identity, but some people get stuck. People who are caught in the narcissistic stage alternate between being, on the one hand, angry towards anything or anybody that does not confirm their view of reality and, on the other, enraptured by grandiose thoughts of their own importance and excellence.
Just reading Kaczynski's manifesto was not good enough for Breivik. He plagiarized the article and wrote it into his compendium, with a few small changes.
Hayashi, Chapman and Kaczynski were all given quite similar and quite serious psychiatric diagnoses. The fact that they were nevertheless found legally sane and put in prison says something about the frequent place of Herostratic terrorists somewhere on a continuum between mental illness and religious or political extremism. The desire of narcissists to be seen as the special and exceptional people they are gives them a mandate to destroy and to kill. Other people and the rest of society have a merely instrumental role. They are tools that can confirm their grandiose self-image and exist solely in that function. From this perspective, the narcissist is in the right. As Hayashi said when questioned by police, ‘I do not believe that I have done anything wrong.’23
Breivik also balanced the moral equations so that Berwick, the knight, had a mandate to kill and to destroy. ‘In many ways, morality has lost its meaning in our struggle,’ he wrote, giving himself the right to kill ‘civilians’. While terrorism as a political tool is often imprecise, with the results of terrorist acts frequently being the opposite of their intentions, the success of Herostratic terrorism is independent of the crime's political consequences. Notoriety is achieved, even if the terrorist and his ideology are largely neither accepted nor respected. The ideology often seems a mere pretext. Whether or not the terrorist is liked is less important than being known.
When Breivik finally broke through the media sound barrier in Oslo city centre and was heard and seen, the response (as he had predicted) was almost exclusively negative, but not entirely (as he had also predicted), and he succeeded in achieving international fame, perhaps as the most famous Norwegian so far this century. An anonymous comment on the parenting website dinbaby.no, possibly meant as a provocation, but maybe not, put it like this: ‘If I could choose to have sex with a celebrity, I would choose Anders Behring Breivik.’
The West End
It was around midnight when Anders Behring Breivik took a last sip of his raspberry-flavour spirits and put the drink aside. It was a short visit to Skaugum that mid-July evening. He did not return. He had a large and broad face from the front, smooth and pale like a statue. His gaze was distant and slightly indifferent, as if he were not all there. From the side, his face appeared oval, as if it belonged to another person. Who was the real Anders Behring Breivik?
On his way home from the Palace Grill, maybe he bade farewell to the part of town where he had lived almost his whole life, or maybe he just planned the route along which he would drive the Doblò on Friday afternoon, on his way out of the centre. In the second half of July, the nights were getting darker in Oslo, and the puddles on the asphalt glittered in the light from the street-lamps. The route Breivik took went through the middle of the West End, the better-off half of Oslo and Breivik's home of thirty-two years.
The West End is protected from what Breivik called the ‘lesser privileged families’24 of the East End by high property prices, sparse public transport and invisible walls. The idealized image of this marriage between wealth and culture, this dreamland with large gardens, is so strong that even people from the West End often believe in it, although the reality is certainly more complicated. From Solli Plass, Bygdøy Allé continued past the National Library, past the park by Norsk Hydro's offices and the memorial to the underground wartime press. The trunks of the chestnut trees vanished in the dark of night.
Towering at the top of Bygdøy Allé is the tall, dark outline of Frogner Church, where Breivik wanted to take his last communion before the operation that would cost his life – his ‘martyr's mass’, as he called it.25 From the age of one and a half until he was three, he had lived in a flat on the hill behind the church, forgotten years that may have left more of a mark than could be seen on the surface. From Frogner Church, Bygdøy Allé turns slightly down again towards Olav Kyrres Plass and the Polish Embassy.
A few hundred metres away to the right was Breivik's old flat in Tidemands Gate, in Frogner, ‘one of the most priciest [sic] areas in Oslo’, as he described it. To the left was the taxi rank in Thomas Heftyes Plass, near Skarpsno, the fictional home of Wilfred Sagen. Sagen was the protagonist of Johan Borgen's 1955 novel Lillelord [Little lord], and is the ultimate West End character in Norwegian literature: the privileged rich man's son who became a Nazi.
At Olav Kyrres Plass, Breivik turned right and walked down Drammensveien towards Skøyen. At the roundabout by Skøyen station, Nedre Skøyen Vei went up the way to the low-rise blocks in Skøyen Terrasse. From there, the cycle path continued first a few hundred metres up a slight incline, and then down a steep slope among tall, broad-leaved trees to Nedre Silkestrå, a toytown-like car-free estate consisting of yellow-panelled low-rise housing from the early eighties with a view looking west towards Ullern Church. Anders Behring Breivik moved in there among the lilacs as a three-year-old in the autumn of 1982, together with his mother and half-sister.