A Norwegian Tragedy

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.

‘Now we're going to be big!’ Morg smiled. It was a few months after he had borrowed the moped in Cyprus without asking. This raid was something quite different.

Three shadows glided over the fence and blended into the darkness between the buses. The dull bus roofs looked like the backs of sleeping fish. The watchmen had gone, and there was a window of time that would stay open until the morning traffic started. That was as long as no guards, random policemen or infuriated everyday heroes turned up unannounced. The street lights glimmered on the buses' windows and metal bodies.

The three busmen slipped in between the vehicles and graffiti-bombed the sides of the number 20 and 32 buses. This was their chance to become kings of one of the bus routes that crossed Oslo from east to west. The boys had time to paper the buses with throw-ups – in other words, more elaborate versions of their tags: Morg and Spok in bold with black outlines and filled with colour. Mono groaned. Why did his attempts always turn out so bad? People would see that he was a ‘toy’, a wannabe, an amateur.

There were crews of taggers, groups who worked together, at many of the schools in the West End, but the three lads at Skøyen bus depot were not members of any crew yet. It took time to collect enough points to get in. The toughest crews were from the East End. Downtown was more wicked than uptown. If you bombed on Karl Johans Gate, the main street in the city centre, you were king.

Morg went ‘all city’, as it was known, ‘bombing’ all over town. He planned his missions like a general from his bedroom. He was going to be the greatest. If Spok put twenty cans in his bag, Morg took a stock of a hundred. Spok came into contact with the ‘GSV’ crew from Vålerenga. The abbreviation GSV meant many different things, including ‘grise sporveiens vogner’ [‘mess up public transport carriages’]. There were many foreigners in GSV, including Pakistanis who were linked to the criminal gangs beginning to stir in the West End of Oslo.

After the western and eastern metro systems were joined up at the end of the eighties, hip-hop culture was one of the factors that led to bridges being built over the divide between east and west in Oslo. Hip-hop turned things upside down: now the west looked up to the east. Better to be a gangster with cred than an artist in an overcoat or a daddy's boy in dockside shoes.

Morg was struggling to get into a crew. Maybe he was trying too hard, overambitious. The older boys smiled at him, while his peers kept a distance. He was Asperger-like, a weirdo, according to a tagger from Hovseter.

Mono cannot forget one time when he and a friend were on their way downtown from the basketball court in Njårdhallen sports centre at Makrellbekken. It was the best court in the West End since it had a chain net, just like in the film White Men Can't Jump with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes. In the underpass below the ring road, they came across Morg, all alone on a Saturday afternoon. He was writing on the walls, ‘Morg, Morg, Morg.’

‘What's up, Anders?’ asked Mono. Morg answered him in ‘Kebab Norwegian’, a multi-ethnolect slang incorporating words from many immigrant languages. ‘Schpaa,’ said Morg, meaning cool. It was as if he were pretending to be a Pakistani from GSV, but he was dead serious.

Mono later realized why his tags looked so awful. It was strange that he had not worked it out before. Perhaps graffiti was not entirely his thing. Tagging was a lifestyle, sneaking out at night, nicking spray cans from the paint shops. You acquired an eye for the city's surfaces: is that wall suitable for throwies? The joy of a ‘burner’. Scratching spotless surfaces, leaving your mark on the façades of Oslo's West End. Money and more money for teamwear (Chicago Bulls was the usual; Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were the names that mattered), hoodies and tagging trainers. Chevignon jackets in winter, and never a day without a baseball cap.

The real pros went to Denmark and bought consignments of cheap spray cans in Copenhagen. You came to know the names of crews and taggers, toys and kings, the pacts that existed, which areas were no-go zones and who had grassed on whom. A science for the initiated, but meaningless for the other metro passengers with their heads in the newspaper, looking up indifferently at the splashes of colour rushing past the window. Almost all of them were caught eventually, and the fines were getting steeper and steeper.

‘Taghead!’ proclaimed an angry information campaign by the public transport authorities. The Winter Olympics at Lillehammer were approaching and the façades of the capital had to look spotless. In Oslo, a teenage tagger was given an immediate custodial sentence of seven months. The taggers responded by ‘bombing’ seats and windows. Morg collected emergency hammers and, according to his own accounts, wrecked ticket machines with a bolt gun. The public transport authorities signed a contract with private security com­panies to smash the tagging community. Zero tolerance. The municipality took a hard stance, which resulted in practically criminalizing a generation of youngsters. In total, 1,136 young people were reported for graffiti in the nineties, including not only Morg and the high-profile criminal David Toska but also the famous actor Aksel Hennie.

This war also affected the tagging communities internally. Grassing was the lowest of the low. It was rumoured that one of the Ris lads had grassed on some of the best-known taggers from Oslo's West End. At the same time, Mono's parents became concerned. They found out that Mono was stealing. Morg and Spok's year group was notoriously wild and a party never went by without fighting. Mono remembered one Friday at a house party in the Vinderen part of town. Some strangers gate-crashed the party, as they always did. This time it was taggers on the look-out for the Ris lads.

‘Motherfucker!’ shouted one of the guests. He was Norwegian but used Kebab Norwegian slang. The stranger suddenly spun round, flooring one of the Ris taggers with a roundhouse kick. That was just the beginning of the reprisals. It was said that Spok was beaten up in the fields at Ekebergsletta, while Morg was left alone. He was never quite at the centre of events, a peripheral figure.

Mono was already out of the country by then. When Mono was sixteen, he lived with his diplomat parents in a city in the Middle East widely known for terrorism, conflicts and attacks, but for Mono the Middle East was an oasis of calm after his time at lower secondary in Oslo. He gave up tagging. The three busmen had got away from their operation at Skøyen bus depot without a scratch. For a few days, Morg was king of the number 32 bus. Mono shook his head at the thought. For the life of him, he could not understand why he had tagged the number 20 bus with his right hand, when he was left-handed.

A School with Class

As you take the metro line heading up from the city centre towards Holmenkollen, a large, white brick building appears on the left-hand side between Vinderen and Gaustad station. Unobtrusive birch trees surround the prominent building like pale servants standing at attention. The elegant yard in front of the school looks exactly like the driveway in front of a manor house. A daydreaming metro passenger could easily imagine horse-drawn carriages and open-top vintage cars stopping here in a bygone era, dropping off well-dressed gentlemen and ladies with stoles before the couples proceed to the entrance, arm in arm on their way to the ball …

Both my mother and my brother went to Ris School, and I was offered a place at Ris Upper Secondary School in 1985.

The large windows of the old building have many stories to tell. The school was requisitioned by the German occupation forces in May 1940 and initially housed Austrian Alpine troops, mounted combat units that were billeted in the school's hippodrome, the brick building that has recently housed the R.O.O.M. furniture shop. The Austrians were later replaced by Wehrmacht reserve units.

The hippodrome was the scene of one of the Nazis' biggest events in Norway. On 30 June 1941, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler visited the school at Ris to receive the oath of allegiance from the first Norwegian recruits who had volunteered for the ‘Wiking’ division of the Waffen SS to take part in the crusade against the Bolsheviks – in other words, the attack on the Soviet Union. Hundreds of young people in black were marched up in the hippodrome under flags with the swastika and SS banners to listen to the Reichsführer's speech.² Down in the city centre, the legendary resistance fighter Max Manus was sneaking over the rooftops, looking for a place from which he could shoot Himmler. The assassination plans were not carried out. The thought of German reprisals acted as a deterrent.

Lessons at Ris were moved to Ullern School, where a tense relationship arose with Ullern's headmaster, who was from Nasjonal Samling, the fascist party. The teachers from Ris were good Norwegians, according to local historians: ‘The teachers were patriots to a man, as were the pupils. There were perhaps some collaborators here and there, but they were soon frozen out and stopped going to school.’³

The granite memorial outside underlines the attitude of Ris School during the war. Carved into the memorial stone are the names, dates of birth and dates of death of thirty-three young men and one woman, as well as the places where they were killed during the war. Many were aircrew; some died on distant battlefields in Europe, while others were shot in Akershus Fortress or killed fighting the Gestapo in Oslo. On sunny autumn mornings, the memorial cast a long shadow across the moist grass and damp asphalt outside the school where the pupils went past on their way from the metro station.

Many of the best-known resistance heroes of the war lived along the Holmenkollen line, the metro line that goes through Gaustad station, by Ris School. Max Manus's house was at Gulleråsen and had a view across the fjord where he had blown up German ships during the war. Gunnar Sønsteby, the most highly decorated Norwegian citizen, lived further up towards the edge of the forest, not far from the small lake of Bånntjern. Those of us who grew up there felt their presence, the living memories of the resistance, even though we were born many decades after the war. The memorial stone carries the following inscription: ‘They could have continued their normal lives, they had to go, they were called.’

The memorial stone at Ris Lower Secondary School

The sacrifice of these thirty-four national martyrs meant that Norwegians could still be proud of being Norwegian, even after a war in which large parts of the population remained passive and a significant minority actively supported the Nazis. The memorial stone tells the pupils at Ris School a story of honour. They too, if required, are expected to sacrifice their lives for their country. If you attend the patrician Ris School, you will learn to think big. Monuments like this form the glue of national communities and can be found all across Europe. At Thermopylae, a stone still stands to mark the spot where Leonidas and his 300 Spartans fell in battle against the Persian King Xerxes in 480 bc. The inscription on the stone reads: ‘Go, stranger, and to Lacedaemon tell that here, obeying her behests, we fell.’ 2,500 years have passed since Thermopylae, but the memory of the Spartans' martyrdom lives on, perhaps because it can be seen in a context that still gives meaning. The Spartans allegedly fell in the West's struggle for freedom against the invading hordes from Asia, where Greek democracy (certainly not especially advanced in Sparta, which was governed by priests) stood against despotism, free Greeks against Persia's slaves.

300, a cartoonish epic in which Leonidas is portrayed by a well-trained Gerald Butler, was in any case listed by Anders Behring Breivik as his favourite film on the Facebook profile he set up on 17 July 2011. Winston Churchill and Max Manus were other favourite figures of his. The echo of the struggle against foreign occupation, carved in stone outside Ris School, reverberated all the way into Anders' social media profiles.

Ris School has been renovated and rebuilt several times since the municipal council took over its dilapidated buildings in 1945. The wooden floors and doorsills had been worn down by the German soldiers' jackboots, while toilets and sinks had been smashed and destroyed. My mother finished school in 1945, but over the years she had spent at Ris Gymnasium she had hardly set foot in the building. The school has been restored and rebuilt, but every May its aura as a nest of resistance is brought to life when wreaths with Norwegian flags are laid by the monument to the school's war dead.

I chose to renounce my place at Ris Upper Secondary School in 1985. Down jackets, headbands and Alpine skiing were never my thing. There were also some weirdos there who listened to heavy rock and were interested in weapons, but that was not my thing either. Social class was a reality at Ris. My cousin told me a story about a children's birthday party at nearby Slemdal. One of the boys turned up at the party with his hair slicked down, driven by a private chauffeur. The chauffeur passed the ten-year-old a bag with his indoor shoes and a present for the host. ‘Thank you, Jensen,’ the boy answered. ‘You may leave, Jensen.’

My brother went to lower secondary school at Ris in the seventies and told me how one of the boys in his class was known only as ‘the pig farmer's son’. Teasing and conflicts went on at all schools, but they took on a unique upper-class twist at Ris. My mother told me similar stories from her childhood when she went to Slemdal and Vinderen primary schools in the thirties. Among the wealthy children there were also the sons and daughters of gardeners, drivers and butlers. The children were in the same classes when they were small, but everyone knew that the servants' children would not go further than middle school. Ris Gymnasium was reserved for the upper-class families. In addition to the difference between the financial and the cultural elites, or snobs and freaks as they were known in the eighties, there were historical class differences in the West End. They were understated, but real.

A lot had changed since my mother went to Ris during the war, and the class differences had apparently been ground down in the post-war period. The Labour Party state and the ’68ers had brought to an end the time when people stood cap in hand and when little lords gave orders to their chauffeurs. As for designer clothing, Ris was not the only school in Norway where the fashion police ruled, but something lingered in the restored buildings.

One of those who applied to go somewhere else after finishing at Ris Lower Secondary School was Jonas Gahr Støre from Gråkammen, a short distance away. Although many of his friends were staying on at Ris for upper secondary, he saw Ris as constricted, characterized by a conservative social set that was not very open to new ideas. A marshy lake with no new water flowing in and no outflow, nothing for a restless soul.

Støre ended up instead at Berg Upper Secondary School, near the neighbourhood of Tåsen, a school with a more varied and diverse range of pupils, attended by young people from across the city. It had an international curriculum. Støre wanted space, a wider stage for expressing himself than the hippodrome at Ris. He wanted to be many things, not just one thing. To be free. Why did Norway have to be a small country anyway? Why could it not be bigger, in the sense that it could be filled with great variation and changes, surprising viewpoints and unfamiliar spaces? A place where everyone had the chance to choose their own life, instead of being defined by traditions and customs. Støre was interested in revue theatre, and in politics too.

In spite of an individualistic inclination, Støre appreciated social democracy and the notion that everyone had equal rights and equal options in life. Freedom is best enjoyed in an open, egalitarian and inclusive society. Hierarchies lead to oppression both for the master and for the servant, both for the slick-haired ten-year-old and for his chauffeur. Støre left Ris and considered joining the AUF but thought the organization as it existed in the West End was a little dynastic, a little sectarian. The driving forces were Jens Stoltenberg, the son of leading Labour Party politician Thorvald Stoltenberg, and Hans Jacob Frydenlund, son of foreign minister Knut Frydenlund. Støre looked further to other social sets, other cities and other countries. First he went to the Norwegian Naval Academy in Bergen and then to Sciences Po in Paris, where he found his political direction in the mid-eighties.

The Bomber from Ris

Whatever happened to the pig farmer's son? Not everyone who left Ris School set out on the path to being foreign minister.

In the mid-eighties, a former pupil of Ris Upper Secondary School ended up in Ullersmo Prison after a dynamite attack on a mosque in the Frogner neighbourhood of Oslo. Witnesses thought it was a miracle that nobody was killed in the attack, which stunned the whole nation. ‘Jens Erik’ was also convicted of crimes for profit. In the nineties, he distanced himself from right-wing extremism and became a central figure in the ‘Exit’ project, which helped young people wanting to leave neo-Nazi groups. Today he is a normal family man as well as a keen runner in his spare time. Perhaps the energy of his youth is not entirely gone.

He started at Ris Upper Secondary School ten years before Breivik started at lower secondary, but there are some parallels in their stories.

Jens Erik was an outsider. Going to Ris was a painful experience. Nobody was directly malicious towards him or consciously shut him out, he would later believe. On the surface, it was not a particularly negative situation, with no bullying, but it was as if he did not quite fit in. Sport was the focus of attention at Ris, but Jens Erik was no sportsman, at least not in cross-country skiing, tennis or orienteering, which were the main disciplines in the local sports club, Idrettslaget Heming. Team sports were not the big thing on the hill below Holmenkollen, where Norway's most famous skiing competitions take place. Jens Erik had attended lower secondary school in Molde, on the west coast of Norway, where he had been used to being one of the best in the class without having to make too much effort. At Ris he was suddenly the worst at everything. The standard was high, but perhaps his academic decline was just as much a consequence of his unhappiness. In his second year he failed in physics, which should perhaps have alerted the teachers since he had been a good pupil to begin with.

‘Is everything OK, Jens Erik?’ one of the teachers asked him, to which he naturally replied: ‘Of course!’

The school's commitment went no further than that. The pupils had to work things out for themselves.

When Jens Erik got off the metro at Gaustad station in the mornings, having come from the direction of the city centre, all the other pupils would be coming the other way, from Holmenkollen, Gulleråsen or Gråkammen. Jens Erik had the feeling that the others came from a small and closed community in which the families knew each other and lived according to set rules that nobody else understood, as if they had always lived there. While the others had holiday cabins by the sea or in the mountains, Jens Erik lived with his single mother at a not especially glamorous address downtown.

Every day, he could sense the unspoken class differences. Jens Erik went home from school by himself. He was interested in the history of warfare and found a journal at the library published by the Institutt for norsk okkupasjonshistorie [Institute of Norwegian Occupation History], which was run by veterans of Nasjonal Samling. In this publication, it was the pupils on the Ris memorial stone that were the baddies, while the goodies were the headmaster of Ullern School and the Austrian Alpine troops. Perhaps this version of events appealed to Jens Erik, who was ‘frozen out and stopped going to school’, almost like the collaborators during the war.

There was a telephone number in the journal, which Jens Erik called. Suddenly he had friends and a political mission. Jens Erik dropped out of school in the summer of 1984.

The extreme right-wing groups took care of outsiders. They accepted the odd ones. Ideology and politics were not really that important for Jens Erik. The important thing was to be accepted. He wanted to be part of a group. It was the same story as with Johnny Olsen, who was convicted of murdering two men in the Hadeland area in 1981, or the groups in the Nordstrand and Bøler neighbourhoods of Oslo in the nineties, members of which murdered the Norwegian-Ghanaian boy Benjamin Hermansen in 2001. These were outsiders, some of whom had also been robbed or harassed by gangs of immigrants in the nineties. Crime was a part of the package, as those who went into extreme right-wing groups had already crossed a number of boundaries. One day, Jens Erik was driving together with his new friends past a mosque in Frogner.

‘Someone should see to blowing that place up,’ the leader said.

‘OK,’ said Jens Erik.

A few days later, he was given some dynamite and a blasting cap by some of the group leaders. Then one night he went out to place the bomb. You do as your group tells you.

According to the school, R–I–S stands for respect, initiative and serving each other. Some are left out, though, and among them are people who have been behind some of the most notorious terrorist attacks in Norwegian history.

Growing Pains in the Nineties

Anders Behring Breivik encountered another side of Oslo when he started at Ris Lower Secondary School in 1992, aged thirteen. The new pupils were lined up outside. The headmaster came out of the school building, wearing his combat dress as an army reserve captain. The headmaster had been on refresher training and greeted the new class like a sergeant at boot camp. It is uncertain whether the headmaster's military style really helped to improve the school. Sometimes the tannoy crackled and the headmaster would announce: ‘Whoever's left a Mozell-branded fizzy pear drink bottle on the steps has five minutes to remove said bottle.’ Many in the classrooms would giggle and impersonate his lisp, and even some of the teachers would shake their heads.

Even if the headmaster was not always respected, though, he was feared. The pupils he did not like would have a hard time at school. The pupil body had changed since the eighties, too. In the early nineties, the lower secondary unit from Smestad School was transferred to Ris. New pupils came, from Hoff and Skøyen, who often had a different social background to the youth from the grand houses of Slemdal and Vinderen. The school community became more open and varied. The variety that Støre was looking for in the seventies came to Ris. The first pupils from immigrant backgrounds appeared in the schoolyard. The new Norway was on its way.

But this new diversity, as well as the increasing level of contact between the West End and the young people further east, was no straightforward matter. Violence and juvenile crime became widespread in a different way from before in the West End of Oslo. The number of reported violent incidents in Oslo rose by 22 per cent in a four-year period in the nineties,⁴ suggesting that Mono's experience of his time at Ris was not just plucked out of thin air. The problem of class, which had possibly never been completely absent, reappeared, but in a new and confusing form. The cap in the hand of the poor boy now did not belong to him; it belonged to you, and he had stolen it. The idea of honour resurfaced. Young people in the nineties had to look after themselves and their possessions. In the process, they discovered the concept of honour: in other words, they took it from the gangs who beat them up.

Hip-hop culture had arrived in Oslo in earnest, offering new opportunities to young people who previously would have been left out. The pig farmer's son was reborn as a hip gangster, and the girls saw him in a different light. The growing pains of the most recent, international wave of immigration were tearing through the city, and the new pupils at Ris Lower Secondary School stood on top of demographic, social and cultural fault lines without realizing their significance. It was as if Oslo itself were a teenager, awkward and uncomfortable, with knobbly knees and bones aching from its sudden growth, short-tempered and moody due to the tempestuous hormones sweeping through its body.

My younger relatives and friends' children frequently spoke of fights and thefts around this time, often involving young immigrants. The author Aslak Nore summed it up it thus: ‘For young people in Oslo in the nineties, theft was a central rite of passage, almost on the same level as confirmation and their first kiss.’⁵ It was in the nineties that the consequences of immigration and the multicultural society first manifested themselves in the West End.

At both Smestad School and Ris, a growing number of pupils came from foreign backgrounds, first and foremost from Pakistan, and some of these youngsters had links to gangs further east in the city. The gangs were better organized and more determined. Teenagers started turning up and loitering in the West End of Oslo, on the lookout for snobs to rob and girls to chat up. The immigrant boys were feared and mythologized, and this fear descended on the school­yards when the gangs came in from the suburbs. This had the strongest effect of all on the taggers, who often allied themselves with what the Oslo rap group Karpe Diem called the ‘West End niggers’ – young people from minority backgrounds with links to the city's gangs. This gave the East End lads access to parties and girls, while those from the West End got protection. But it was an arrangement that bred contempt, and many of the taggers would pay for it sooner or later.

These security pacts were based not on equality but on hierarchy. The gangs in the Oslo area viewed respect as a zero-sum game: in order to get more respect, you had to take it away from others. In normal social transactions, as we learn at school, respect is based on trust; people have mutual respect for each other, and both parties come out stronger. That is not how it works with gangs. For them, respect is about inspiring fear and exercising power over others. When this type of respect becomes a central social value for which young people compete, it is a recipe for conflict. Youngsters would throw insults at each other. ‘Gaylord!’ ‘Your sister's a whore!’ Those who put up with the insults lost all their respect. Those who fought but were given a beating lost a little respect. Those who fought and won took respect from the person they beat.⁶ The gangs derived their ethos from criminal cultures, even though they often referred to traditions from their home countries.

‘Izzat,’ the Pakistanis would say: ‘honour’ in Punjabi.

People who submitted in order to get protection had no respect and so could not expect that their agreements would be honoured if the conditions changed. According to the researcher Inger Lise Lien, the Norwegian boys often came out of this game worse off. They also had to accept that the Norwegian girls went after who was coolest on the streets and so preferred the boys from foreign backgrounds. To some of the Norwegian boys, it appeared as if they had been left as losers, pale dorks ousted from the sexual market, snubbed by history – in their own city.

One solution was to start their own gangs only for Norwegians. Many of these groups became violent and semi-criminal, and many of them were characterized by white pride music and extreme right-wing attitudes. An extreme right-wing group also emerged at Ris Lower Secondary School in the nineties, ten years after Jens Erik had dropped out.

This is not the whole story, of course. In many respects, integration has been successful in Oslo, and the same young people who cursed those with other skin colours, whether white, black or brown, often had friends, girlfriends or boyfriends of different ethnicities. Still, these conflicts in youth culture left their mark. Even fifteen years later, thirty-somethings who had grown up in the West End still described their Pakistani friends and classmates as treacherous vermin.

‘It always ended with the Pakistanis stabbing you in the back,’ sighed a former tagger from Røa, in the West End. A guy from Tåsen spoke about a Moroccan classmate at Sogn Upper Secondary School who allegedly explained to the Norwegian boys that the immigrants had come to Norway to fuck their women and steal their money. ‘He repeated it as often as he could. How do you think a seventeen-year-old would react to that?’

A lad from Bærum started a rumour that the ‘B Gang’, a notorious Pakistani gang, was deliberately colonizing the West End with Pakistanis strategically moving to live in new parts of town. With eyes in the schools and on the streets, the B Gang could stake out the refined houses of the West End and rob the promising youth of the area. This rumour was probably just as distant from reality as Breivik's idea that Oslo's eleven-year-olds engage in oral sex en masse, but it is an accurate expression of the feeling among sections of the West End youth in the nineties of being besieged by the invading hordes from Asia.

On the other hand, the immigrant children did not have an easy time in the West End either. The rap duo Karpe Diem's single ‘Vestkantsvartinga’ [West End nigger] does not describe a dark-skinned superman, a Muslim Tony Soprano in a Norwegian chicken run. The song deals with just how isolated immigrant children were in the sea of white boys and girls, with their expensive brand-name clothes, holiday cabins at Kragerø, good marks at school and condescending attitudes towards those who were different. A former player on the boys' team of the Ready Football Club said that the dads of the West End team Heming, from Slemdal, cheered on their team by shouting ‘Come on, Norway’ when they played against a largely black team from the East End.

The city may no longer have been quite as socially divided as it once was, but the social fusion was not without pain. Oslo was going through a hard time. Its young people were facing new dilemmas and choosing different paths. The parents and teachers of the 1968 generation had passed down a pleasant mental ballast to the teenagers of the nineties – the thought that different cultures can enrich each other – but this did not seem very meaningful when a gang of bullies from Somalia, Turkey or Pakistan ran off with your watch.

Anders Behring Breivik landed in the middle of this chaos. During his time at secondary school, he was supposed to find out who he was, who he wanted to be with and what it was all about. Who was Anders Behring Breivik?

There are some striking similarities between Breivik and Jens Erik. Both lived with their single mothers who were incomers to Oslo (and so did not have much of a social network) and were slightly below their classmates in terms of financial status and where they lived. They were immigrants to the West End and were lacking the key to the locked manor-house door. No entry for the working class. Neither of them were sportsmen; Anders was actually quite clumsy but managed to do enough practice to become ‘average plus’ in ballgames, according to one of his friends. Both of them were interested in the history of warfare. They were good pupils but perhaps not top of the class. Both of them sought out criminal groups, and both dropped out of upper secondary school.

The big difference at Ris between 1982 and 1992 (apart from the difference between its being an upper secondary and a lower secondary) was that the social make-up had become more varied by 1992. In addition to the snobs, the Nazis and the rockers, hip-hop had come to Ris. Breivik became a hip-hopper. He would play not at being a Nazi but at being a gangster. The single-parent boy from Skøyen was more justified than many others in identifying with the lads from the East End suburbs. He tagged, spoke Kebab Norwegian slang and bought American hip-hop clothing from the Jean TV shop downtown at Arkaden shopping centre. The slang for white Norwegians was ‘potatoes’, and Anders later described himself as ‘the cool potato’.⁷ Like other cool potatoes, Anders had his own security pact, a Pakistani friend with connections to the legendary gang superheroes in the East End.

Breivik's friend ‘Rafik’ had also come from Smestad Primary School. He was one of Breivik's neighbours. At Ris the two boys were inseparable, according to the other pupils, together in their outsiderness. Even though Anders always wore expensive clothes, the snob culture, Old Ris, regarded the pair from Smestad as losers and wannabes. Anders was slim and pale. His friend was a Paki. They came from the ‘slum’ down in the hollow below Frogner Park. They were scorned. It was worse for Rafik, who was one of the first from a non-Western background at the school and was tormented because he was different. Perhaps he was subjected to the same amorphous exclusion as Jens Erik, but, according to some of his fellow pupils, there were also more directly racist smears. It was not the neo-Nazis who were the worst tormentors but, just as much, the polo-shirt brigade from the fanciest postcode areas of Oslo.

Perhaps Rafik learnt something from his first year at lower secondary. By the following year he was another person; the caterpillar had turned into a black butterfly. Those who had tormented him would soon see. He spoke about his cousins in the East End.

One of the hip-hoppers from Ris met him on the metro one day. He said hello to Rafik, since the two boys had got on fine during the first year. Rafik was together with another boy, and he ordered his classmate to go with them and steal from some snobs up at Midtstuen. The hip-hopper could act as a guide for Rafik and the gangster from the East End. If he said no, there would be trouble. The other boy looked at him menacingly. They were serious. The hip-hopper pulled open the doors of the metro carriage and squeezed out at Gaustad station before the two young thieves had time to react. He ran through the streets of Ris and Vinderen, racing home. He did not speak to Rafik again after that day.

It was rumoured that Rafik's relatives were in the B Gang. Other pupils from Ris saw Rafik bringing thugs from the East End to exact revenge on those he thought were racists. The boys at school began to keep a distance. People who had previously felt sorry for Rafik, who had ignored him or looked down on him, now became afraid of him.

So Rafik was Anders' ‘security pact’, his connection to the gang culture. Through Rafik, Anders had an opportunity for contact not only with GSV, the crew from Vålerenga, but also with one of the toughest gangs in Oslo: the B Gang. These were the most dangerous boys, with the most expensive cars and the best-looking girls. In any case, Anders thought this was a golden opportunity for ‘the cool potato’. He intensified his tagging, took risks, honed his ghetto style. But it all led nowhere. It is not enough just to think that you are cool; you have to convince others too.

Anders later claimed that he had been betrayed by Rafik and beaten up by his friends. Rafik thought that they simply grew apart, as teenagers do. Anders gradually came to think that Rafik had been carrying out jihad, that the juvenile crime of the nineties was Islamic holy war against infidels. In police questioning, Rafik said that Anders had constructed his past. He had no connections to the B Gang. Not only had Anders fabricated incidents that had not happened and retold urban myths with no basis in reality, he had also interpreted the whole package in a context of religious conflict that he had plucked out of thin air. What had happened in the nineties was a matter of juvenile crime, not jihad.

Other pupils from Ris thought that Rafik remained friends with Anders while he had no other friends but left him as soon as some new friends emerged. It was a typical situation: two outcasts will find their way to each other, but if one of them has a chance to be part of a group he will leave. A common fate is not the same as friendship.

Whatever happened, Anders did not relinquish his style from Ris or, perhaps, his idea that he was ‘the cool potato’, the West End tagger with friends in the B Gang. When he started at Nissen Upper Secondary School in 1995, his classmates reacted negatively to the fact that he spoke Kebab Norwegian and dressed and behaved like an immigrant from the ghetto. A genuine, tough hip-hopper? What a joke.

Anders did not take the point. He was in the same boat as the immigrants, at least in some respects, so why could he not talk and dress like them? It slowly dawned on him that a wannabe Paki was just about the least cool thing you could be at the cultured Nissen School. Perhaps the culture clash at Nissen was one of the reasons why Anders applied to transfer to Oslo Commerce School and toned down his hip-hop style. He saw no more of Rafik. He had no security pact any more, if one had ever existed. His old tagging friends had gone. He tried to adapt, but it was as if he never quite found his niche. Either things went completely wrong or nobody noticed him.

He attended Oslo Commerce School for a year and a half without being noticed. But he left his name behind him at Skøyen bus depot and on the façades of buildings from Ullern to Kolbotn: Morg.

The Aesthetic of Destruction

For the metro passengers who saw the letters daubed on the walls every single day, it was not clear what the taggers were really trying to convey. Most of us cannot even decipher what the taggers have written. ‘GSV’? Or was that ‘CLN’ written on the wall? The letters just ran into each other anyway. Word porridge. What was the point?

‘I'm not a graffiti artist, I'm a graffiti bomber,’ the tagger Cap says in the film Style Wars. This US documentary from 1983 deals with different schools of graffiti in New York and is the taggers' bible. The graffiti writer Cap, who is white, is the villain of the idealistic and multicultural graffiti world shown in the film. Cap does not paint burners or intricate pieces; he is destructive. His aim is to tag more than the others. Not big or beautiful pieces, but to leave his mark everywhere – on every wall and every carriage.

When Cap sees a wall where a crew has spent hours or days working painstakingly on a piece, he immediately writes ‘Cap’ on top of it. Simply and quickly, in red and white. Happiness for him is destroying what is beautiful, because everything beautiful deserves to be erased, forever. No colours, nothing attractive, just destruction for the sake of it – in order to say ‘fuck you’, to say ‘no’, to say ‘don't’. Cap does not see any friendly community of idealistic graffiti artists; he sees no rainbow race creating warmth together, with keen colours on cold concrete. Graffiti is war, and Cap wants to dominate and subdue the others.

While the others are organized in crews, Cap is a one-man army, alone against the world. Sometimes he cannot even be bothered to write, just spraying wavy lines along the sides of carriages and walls, so-called spaghetti. The other taggers in the film accuse him of being talentless, jealous and desperate for publicity, but Cap just answers: ‘I'm a king of bombing.’

Cap articulates the same aesthetic of destruction as that described by Mishima in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. By destroying what is beautiful, you create a peculiar, terrible form of beauty. In a way, you also take the power of the piece you destroy. You diss the tagger who made it, and, in the zero-sum game for respect, you take respect away from him.

Graffiti was a big thing in the West End of Oslo during the nineties. Perhaps the municipality's campaigns and their associated fines, incarcerations and brutal security guards contributed to spreading the view of graffiti as vandalism and as warfare not only among Oslo's citizens, who were initially quite indifferent towards the paintings on the walls, but also among the taggers themselves. It was not only a matter of writing your name in the city, especially in difficult spots where many people would see it and where there was a danger of being caught; it was also a matter of destruction, bombing metro stations and billboards or maybe capping – in other words, ruining other people's pieces.

Cap's spirit crossed the ocean when the taggers started ‘lining’, or crossing out, other tags and throwies, painting wavy lines along the train windows and beating each other up. One of the larger crews was known as TSC, the Spaghetti Crew. Some crews detested colours and wrote only in silver and black. Oslo would become the silver city. Another factor that contributed to the nineties tagging culture in Oslo becoming so tough and brutal could be that the general level of youth violence was higher in the nineties than in the eighties or the noughties.⁸ This meant that there were two ways to gain prestige as a tagger: you could be good or you could be crazy.

Anders followed Cap's formula in not going for big or beautiful pieces, but for more. He bombed across the city. In February 1994 he was back at Skøyen bus depot. While the Winter Olympics were being held in Lillehammer, the boy who wanted to be king was caught for the first time. This time, it was the guards who had their eye on the taggers, and Morg, the bus tagger from Ris, was reported for the first time. His case ended up with mediators. Morg ‘did not plead guilty but declared himself willing to repair the vandalism’, according to the police report. Anders was unable to admit guilt. He ‘defends himself intensely when he does something “wrong” ’, Ris School reported, pointing to incidents when he had been late, had forgotten his homework or was confronted by his teachers for other reasons.

For Anders, his tagging was a way of living out his identity as a lower-class gangster. It was also an instructive experience, and possibly a formative one. A tagger is a salesman trying to sell himself as a tough guy, an advertiser with an eye for which surfaces are best suited to spreading his message, and an artist, since the aesthetic of destruction is still an aesthetic. Tagging was his first encounter with crime, and the first time he bombed the city. Perhaps, most of all, it was also an opportunity to be part of a secret community, a kind of fraternal lodge for the initiated.

In ‘Fra vugge til grav’ [From cradle to grave], a song by the hip-hop group Klovner i kamp [literally, ‘clowns at war’], a group member known as Dansken [‘the Dane’] describes his past as a tagger:

Me and Dr S drew sketches in our rooms as kids

And walked up and down bombing the streets where we lived.

We bought Multiple T, stashing the cans in our bags

And ran from everyday heroes, cops and guard skags.

But I was a jammy dodger and life's not fair

So it was always Dr S who ended up getting snared.

A tagger who did not fit into any crew could fall back on Cap's idea of being a one-man army. During this period, Anders started doing exercise. He got up early in the morning to do a session before school. He also did his newspaper round, so as rebels come he was an extraordinarily disciplined boy. He was able to get fit, to put on the ‘game face’, as he would later say. Having been a slender boy, he gradually became strong and muscular, but he was still no tough guy and perhaps thought with horror about what would happen if the guards caught him a third time.

Figuratively, taggers are a cross between terrorists (who ‘bomb’) and hit men using ‘silencers’ on their spray cans – in other words, magnets under the cans to keep the little mixing balls still, so they do not make too much noise. When the young Aksel Hennie ran around the city at night with his bag full of spray cans, without knowing it he was practising for the lead role he would later play in the 2008 Norwegian epic Max Manus: Man of War, about the eponymous resistance hero from Oslo. Spok and Wick were Anders' two closest tagging friends, and both were well-known West End taggers with connections to a number of crews. Anders described himself as ‘the glue of the gang’,⁹ the one who organized the group and built alliances – not a figurehead, but the one who led from behind the scenes. Other West End taggers thought that Anders was trying to command and control Spok and Wick, who responded by distancing themselves from him.

Anders was a typical teenager, extremely self-confident and extremely insecure at the same time. There was something dissonant about him, something persistent. He was working his socks off to be cool, but either you are cool or you are not. Rafik left him, and Spok and Wick disappeared. But Anders would not give up.

The second time he was caught, it was by the police, not security guards. On 23 December 1994, the fifteen-year-old arrived at Oslo Central Station all alone on the train from Copenhagen, and the police found forty-three spray cans in his bag. The vagrancy the SSBU had talked about had now taken on international proportions. Copenhagen was where cheap paint could be bought, so many Norwegian taggers would go there, and Anders had treated himself to a real Christmas present. Two weeks later, he was caught again. This time he was filmed by security guards writing on a railway underpass at Storo. The guards gave people two chances. According to the rules of the game, he would get a beating the next time he was caught.

In their report, the police were taken aback to discover that the boy ‘was in possession of a metal-tipped emergency hammer’.

At this time, child welfare came back on the scene, ten years after they had dropped his case. There were some discussions between the caseworker, Anders and his mother. It turned out that he had travelled to Denmark on his own once before. His mother was worried that her son would become a criminal, but Anders played it down. In February 1995, the fifteen-year-old wrote a letter to child welfare to announce that he would no longer co-operate with them after having been ‘exposed’ at school. Grassing is the ultimate sin for a tagger, and he alleged that child welfare had grassed to people at school about his situation. The school pointed out that it was Anders himself who had told them about his child welfare case when his class were discussing tagging and ethics, but Anders was adamant.

At the same time, his mother withdrew her consent enabling child welfare to obtain information in relation to the case. Perhaps she was not worried any more, perhaps she did not like things coming out that put her family in a bad light, or maybe she was just following some kind of internal pattern. She asked for help and then pulled out. She gave her consent and then withdrew it. The same pattern repeated itself from the saga of the respite home in 1981 to the court case in 2012. Neither mother nor son attended their next appointments. Child welfare shrugged their shoulders and dropped the case, stating that it appeared as if the small family had ‘made up’.

His trips to Copenhagen were not the only thing that Anders was known for at Ris School. Like most boys, he was involved in a couple of fights, in which he both beat up other people and was beaten up himself, but the incident many former pupils remember is the time he punched the headmaster. The military-style headmaster had apparently accused Anders of committing some violation or another, but nobody remembers any more whether it was to do with tagging or a fizzy pear drink bottle left on the steps. Perhaps the headmaster saw honour and respect more or less the same way as the gangs did. Anders denied having done anything wrong.

‘Alright,’ said the headmaster. ‘Then hit me, if it's true that you didn't do it.’

It is unknown what the headmaster really meant by that, but Anders did as he was told and punched the headmaster in the chest – hard. Maybe in a way the headmaster was like the judge in the custody case ten years earlier, a man from the fifties with old-fashioned values and slightly simplistic solutions to the difficult problems facing Ris School. Many of the other pupils would probably have liked to see Anders hit him even harder.

At the end of their time at lower secondary, the whole of class 9A went on an end-of-term trip to a cabin on the island of Hvasser, near Tjøme in Vestfold county. They were going to swim, have a barbecue and reminisce about their time together. On the train down to Tønsberg, Anders gave a sly smile. Something was rattling in his bag.

‘Shit, Anders! Have you brought spray cans along now?!’ His classmates shook their heads.

‘Of course,’ said Anders. ‘We're going to Tønsberg, after all.’

It was as if he was unable to appreciate that this was neither the time nor the place. His classmates explained to him that it would be impossible for him to do anything in Tønsberg in the quarter of an hour they had before getting their bus. This was not a tagging mission but an end-of-term trip. An end-of-school trip! Was he going to tag the rocks on the shore or something? Forget it, Anders. But the spray cans did come in useful after all.

As twilight fell on the bonfire where class 9A were gathered on the island, out came the cans from the bag. One by one, Anders threw them on the bonfire, where they exploded with thunderous roars. The flames from the explosions reached up high into the warm June air. Three years at fucking Ris were over with a bang, and Anders' career as a tagger was as good as over too, at least as far as he was concerned.

Tagging had given Anders training in planning and carrying out illegal acts. His bedroom at Silkestrå had become a war room where material procurement and operations were planned in detail. One of his friends later said that Anders carried the idea that ‘your reputation follows you’ on into his adult life.¹⁰ Tagging gave him a modus operandi, and, maybe most importantly, tagging was the first time that Anders created an avatar for himself: Morg.

Taggers have a signature, a persona if you like, which is the name they write. Morg was Anders Behring Breivik's alias, his first virtual self. Morg was a bad boy, a one-man army, a criminal rebel and an artist with a code of honour. Just as a narcissist creates an inflated self-image, Anders had created Morg, and he used Morg to market himself. For a number of old acquaintances from his tagging days, Anders was not ‘Anders’ but ‘the guy who used to write “Morg” ’. They had forgotten his name, if they had ever known it, but they remembered his tag.

Taggers choose their names for various reasons. Their names should be cool, they should express something, show attitude, and they should look good when they are sprayed on walls. Morg was not a bad tag. It was easy to remember and slightly creepy, since it sounded like the English word ‘morgue’. It also contains a reference to the Marvel comics of the early nineties, and that is probably where Anders found his name.¹¹

The company Marvel Comics has been in business since 1939 and is best known for superheroes such as Captain America, Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, but the Marvel Universe also contains a host of supervillains. One of them is Morg, known as the executioner. His weapon is a double-edged axe, an executioner's axe, which he used to behead his own people. Morg is a traitor: when his peo­ple were defeated, he went into the service of the victors and was assigned the duty of executing his own people, which he performed mercilessly.

To describe the stories and characters of the Marvel Universe as cartoonish is putting it mildly. They are almost impossible to relate to the uninitiated, but it is easy to see how Morg could fit into ‘RL’, real-life stories. He would not have been a name on the memorial stone outside Ris School. Morg the executioner was on the same side as Heinrich Himmler and the headmaster at Ullern School during the war.

The illustrations of Morg depict a swollen, reddish torso with muscles like inflated balloons. His shoulders and upper arms bristle with lizard-like spikes for use as defensive and offensive weapons. Beneath his thin hair, his face is distorted in a skull-like grimace. His enormous, double-headed axe hangs in front of his crotch like a colossal phallus.

The supervillain Morg

If you take away the exaggerated and comic aspects of the Marvel Universe (even though caricature is the whole point), if you, heaven forbid, were to view the comics as a kind of reality, or reality as a kind of comic book, then the figure of Morg is sadism incarnate. The only thing missing is an SS badge. The supervillain has some of the characteristics of Cain, the brother-killer, and represents the same aesthetic of destruction as professed by Cap. Anders had an emergency hammer, but perhaps it was Morg with his axe standing there at Grønland police station in January 1995, denying he had been tagging, even though he accepted the fine of 3,000 kroner. Morg can also be bought online as a plastic action figure.

Anders would cultivate a considerable number of avatars over the years, but Morg was his first.

The Tåsen Gang

One day, while Anders was in year nine at school, there was trouble during the lunch break. Visitors came to Ris, and some of the lads from Ris turned pale. They knew they had crossed one of the city's invisible boundaries, and now they were worried about what the consequences would be. The gang that was paying Ris a visit was made up not of Kurds or Albanians but of Norwegians. It was not from one of the East End suburbs of Oslo but from Tåsen, in the north of the city, a white middle-class neighbourhood not far from Ris.

The Tåsen Gang was gaining recognition and respect all across Oslo because they took a stand against the immigrants and the powerful gangs. A couple of years later, the villa gangsters from Tåsen had become legend: the lads who were tougher than the immigrants. Child thieves on the metro's Sognsvann line and gate-crashers from downtown who turned up at parties between Kringsjå and Blindern risked getting beaten up by the Tåsen Gang. But this time, the gang was out for revenge.

The weekend before, some of the lads from Ris had been at a party with girls from Tåsen, thereby stepping quite some distance into the Tåsen Gang's territory. The fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds from Tåsen were already notorious maniacs and bullies and were now going to beat up the lads at Ris, teach them a lesson and then hurry back to their own lessons at Tåsen School.

Anders must have noticed the anxiety in the eyes of the young aristocrats from Ris who knew that they did not stand a chance against the lads from Tåsen, and perhaps this sight made an impression on him. The Tåsen guys had entered the schoolyard, looking for their victims, when the situation took an unexpected turn. Out of the main building rushed the headmaster. He caught hold of a couple of the Tåsen kids and quickly and resolutely reduced the tough guys to a group of normal boys leaving Ris School slightly crestfallen, with unfinished business. Behind them were some relieved boys from Ris, and a pensive Anders Breivik.

One of the Tåsen lads who were there that day, ‘Dekor’, laughed about the incident. ‘That's what it was like sometimes. Even those of us who were so damn cool got beaten sometimes. Initiative is everything in situations like that, and that headmaster at Ris sure knew how to sort out people.’

The urban myth of Anders' generation about how ruthless the immigrants were was to do with a Norwegian girl who was battered by a Pakistani gang in Frogner Park. The boys allegedly cut up her face with a knife, as the pimps in Naples used to do to brand their whores in the nineteenth century. Breivik mentioned this story in his compendium, as well as an alleged rape of another Norwegian girl by a group of Pakistanis. He also wrote about a number of incidents in which he got into trouble with immigrants and ‘wannabe Pakistanis’ (which presumably means Norwegians), the result of which, with a couple of exceptions, was that he had to run off, was beaten up, or both.

In one of these cases, Breivik accused Rafik of being involved in an incident in which Breivik was punched on the steps at Majorstua. Again it is uncertain how much of this is true, and his friends raised doubts about a number of these incidents. Rafik told people he knew that he did not know about any rape incident, and that there had not been any dramatic break between him and Anders. When they would meet each other later, it was always on good terms.

In Anders' compendium, the Oslo of the nineties is characterized by contempt for women, a gangster mentality, racism and a kind of violent sexuality in which sex with the Norwegian ‘potato whores’, whether it was willing or unwilling, was a symbolic rape of Norway as a nation and a humiliation of Norwegian men. Hundreds of Norwegians had allegedly been killed in jihadi attacks, he claimed, while right-wing extremists were responsible for only one killing: the murder of Benjamin Hermansen. In addition to his own experiences, Anders had ‘heard of and witnessed hundreds of Jihadi-racist attacks, more then 90% of them aimed at helpless Norwegian youth (who themselves are brought up to be “suicidally” tolerant and therefore are completely unprepared mentally for attacks such as these)’.¹² Although this situation was exaggerated and presented in quite absurd terms, it was not entirely plucked out of thin air (if we are to believe researchers), so against this background maybe it was not so strange that Anders changed course while at upper secondary school. Not only did he leave Nissen School for the Commerce School, but he also went from being a ‘wannabe Pakistani’ to coming into contact with the Tåsen Gang.

Some people can speak without even opening their mouths. ‘Dekor’ is such a person. His face is not one that you forget. It tells a story as soon as he sits down at the table: a story about the city of Oslo. Dekor also has a physical presence that you cannot get away from. You can feel him from a distance, as if he were standing right next to you when he is really on the other side of the table, eating his salad. Dekor is towering in height, even when he is sitting down, although he has evolved over the years from a fierce Viking towards being a friendly teddy bear. He is calm and attentive, and his jaws show no signs of the steroids he used to take. He talks slowly in short, concise sentences, occasionally dragging his words out, as if caressing them before sending them out into the world. He has the air of an artist who enjoys attention and likes telling a good story.

Maybe the Tåsen Gang was partly theatre, like black grouse trying to ward off their rivals, a gang of over-energetic boys, some diagnosed with ADHD, improvising ever wilder performances and relishing the associated attention. Clowns at war. Their stage was composed of streets and newsagents' shops, parties and schoolyards in the north and west of Oslo. Dekor's father was in show business and a band manager, among other things. Dekor was a driving force in the Tåsen Gang: the craziest, the strongest and the one who had the wildest parties.

‘I was actually a bit of an outsider at school,’ Dekor explained. ‘Didn't have many friends, wasn't cool. But when I started lower secondary, it was a turning point in my life. I walloped one of the cool kids. He went straight down. Suddenly I was the cool one. “Wow”, I thought, “this works.” In a way, you could say that was how it started.’

It was fighting that would become a trademark for Dekor and eventually for the other lads in the group that became known as the Tåsen Gang, but it was fighting 2.0 compared to the normal fights at parties that I remember from the eighties. It was immigrants who taught them.

When they were fourteen or fifteen, the conflict with the immigrant gangs began, including the Pakistanis in the ‘A Gang’ from Bjølsen and the Young Guns. Dekor remembers this as a series of humiliations. The gangs would surround their victims, taking their caps, pushing them around and spitting at them, preferably while the girls were watching. The Tåsen lads decided to put a stop to this degradation. Things like that should not happen, so they fought back. The Norwegian boys were used to fighting one on one. The problem was that, when they did that and won, the rest of the gang would jump on them and give them a real beating. You learn from experiences like that.

The Tåsen Gang began to fight as a group. ‘I've got fifteen psychopaths behind me’ is a line from the song ‘Alt som ikke dreper’ [What doesn't kill us] by Klovner i kamp. The rap group had its origins in the Tåsen Gang, and the gang's motto was ‘What doesn't kill us makes us stronger’. You had to bear pain, laughing off a punch in the face. When the immigrants started using knives, the Tåsen Gang armed themselves too, with bats, stones or whatever was to hand. One of the lads became known for beating up people with ashtrays, and broken bottles were a recurrent theme.

One of the lads became a specialist in neo-Nazi music, and, through Sogn Upper Secondary School, the Tåsen boys got to know the neo-Nazis from Bøler. They had some parties together, but, although Dekor and the others once tagged the school at Sogn with slogans such as ‘Pakis go home’ or ‘Norway for Norwegians’, the Tåsen Gang never became an extreme right-wing group. At Sogn they actually managed to spell ‘Norway for Norweigans’, which became a local joke at Tåsen. This racist stunt caused the conflict with the immigrant gangs to flare up again, as the school at Sogn took in pupils from across the city.

Dekor became an expert in fighting, and his philosophy was simple: ‘Initiative. Initiative is everything. It doesn't matter how big you are or how many of you there are. If you just make the first move and go straight at them, you'll win. Even if you go at them and get a beating, you haven't lost. OK, you get beaten up, but you still won because you showed initiative.’

Gangs are about fellowship, respect, territory, parties, rules and stories: more or less like tagging. Dekor, Dansken and several of the other Tåsen lads were taggers. Crime is the logical consequence of gang activity; breaking the laws of society strengthens the group's internal bonds. The Tåsen Gang did a few small jobs, but they never competed with the Pakistani gangs or the Tveita Gang, which were involved or became involved in serious crime. The Tåsen Gang started stealing cars, for fun and not making any money out of it. Dekor acquired a universal Ford Escort key from a garage, so they could take as many Escorts as they wanted. ‘That's how we learnt to drive,’ he explained. ‘We did handbrake skids on the pitch at Voldsløkka and would zoom around on the gravel there.’

Apart from some minor burglaries of newsagents, Dekor and his friends were not particularly interested in break-ins. The Tåsen lads liked doing things when they would be seen – for example, they might go into a 7-Eleven shop and help themselves to things from the shelves en masse so all the staff could do was watch. Dekor specialized in hit-and-run raids at petrol stations and paint shops. He would storm in like a thundercloud, grab spray cans, Tectyl and whatever he needed for his tagging, then disappear just as suddenly as he had appeared. Initiative and shock tactics were his trademark. ‘Later on we started dealing, mainly at Sogn and the schools in the West End,’ he explained, ‘and then we soon realized that it was better to earn money than to spend it all the time. But we never went very far as drug-dealers.’

Drugs first entered the scene when they were in their late teens, mostly hash and cocaine, and anabolic steroids.

The Tadpole Mafia

Anders turned up in Tåsen aged seventeen or eighteen, probably in the summer between his second and third years at the Commerce School, according to the Tåsen lads' back-calculations. Some of Anders' tagging mates from Ris had played with Dekor in Lyn Football Club, and it was through these connections that Anders turned up at the legendary parties at Dekor's place. Admittance was not offered to just anybody, but the Tåsen lads had heard of Morg. Anders had graffiti-bombed the city centre, on Karl Johans Gate. It was not easy to write your name there, and Anders won respect for that story.

To tell the truth, it was not by tagging that the Tåsen Gang made their name. ‘Our clique painted trains with silver sleek and buses with black brushes,’ Dansken rapped. ‘The sight of a new fresh coloured burner gave life essence. / I got lessons, but my talent didn't improve with patience / The explanation, sorry for painting, not my vocation.’ Perhaps because the Tåsen Gang's tagging skills were so bad, they let Anders bomb with their crew, RTM, which stood for ‘Royal Trade Mark’ or ‘Rumpetrollmafiaen’ [‘The Tadpole Mafia’]. A loved child has many names, as the Norwegian proverb says, and so does a crew of taggers. Dekor thought that Anders was a better-known tagger than he was, even though Anders did not have any major talent either. Skøyen's own Munch he was not, but you can get far in tagging if you make some effort and are bold, like Morg. At Dekor's parties, Anders also demonstrated another ability that won him respect with the villa gangsters. A couple of the lads were good at arm-wrestling, but Anders beat them both.

‘He was fit,’ one of the Tåsen lads remembered. ‘There weren't many of us who did weights back then, but Anders did.’

Before long, Anders had established himself as a kind of Tåsen Gang hanger-on. One night in June, the police caught him again, this time for driving a moped without a licence and with a blood alcohol level over 0.1 per cent. He joined the Tåsen Gang for their parties and went out bombing with RTM. This must have made an impression on Anders. He was not exactly the coolest in the class at either Ris or Nissen, but now he had been accepted by the toughest lads in town. He had not been successful as a ‘West End nigger’, but so what? All those nights he had spent at some godforsaken concrete underpass or metro station half the way to Bærum were finally paying off, all those nights he had spent his hard-earned paper round money spraying out ‘Morg, Morg, Morg, Morg, Morg’.

The Tåsen Gang were showmen and they were Norwegians; their ideals were heroic and things were simple: either you had cred or you were a nerd. If you lost your status, you were finished; the gang did not accept losers. The immigrants who used to be heroes were now enemies. Bloody Muslims, and fuck those Norwegian girls who got involved with immigrants. ‘We called them Paki whores,’ Dekor explained.

One night during the magical summer of 1997, Anders went alone with Dekor, Mr Tåsen himself, to graffiti-bomb Vestgrensa station. This was a sign of how far he had come. In the old days, at Skøyen bus depot, he had dreamt of belonging to a crew, being part of a gang and being respected. After four years of hard struggle, he had made it from there to Tåsen. Morg the executioner had finally pulled it off. The two boys vanished into the midnight darkness, down towards the city through empty streets, past gardens with fruit trees and trampolines. Down in Bjølsen, on the A Gang's patch, they bombed walls and bus stops as a message to Rashid and the other child thieves from Pakiland. Perhaps a message from Morg to Rafik too, and to all the others who had let him down over the years. When he was with Dekor, he had nothing to fear. His reputation alone was enough to keep people away. Anders had been caught for tagging twice before. True, that was a long time ago, but perhaps he was worried about being caught a third and final time.

He told Dekor stories about Security Concept, the company that the public transport authorities were using for their tagbusting campaign. People came all the way from New York to study Oslo's fight against graffiti, and on the front line for the municipal council was a former mercenary soldier, a man who was rumoured to be able to break bones with his bare hands – an articulate smart guy with officer training who was polite in a psychopathic way. You were safe on the streets, but if you went near any public transport facilities, the guards might be hiding in the bushes anywhere.

The alpha male Dekor pricked up his ears in interest. Perhaps he suspected he would run into the mercenary sooner or later.

Morg and Dekor walked on into the dawn light, past Ullevål Hospital and the towering outlines of the oak trees in John Colletts Allé, and up to Damplassen. It was warm, as if Oslo had become a friendlier and safer version of its usual hard and moody self. Their spray cans rattled in their bags, and they had already made a sketch of the piece they were planning. At Vestgrensa station there was a wall at the back of a nursery school that was visible from the metro. The wall was that night's big target, but first Morg and Dekor did a round of the metro station.

There, on the concrete walls and wooden fences, Morg officially became a part of RTM, the Tåsen crew. The two boys’ tags fitted into the crew's name. First, Dekor sprayed ‘dekoR’, then he added a ‘T’, before Morg finished it with ‘Morg’, so that ‘dekoRTMorg’ was written on every surface of the now closed station, in many cases with a piece of spaghetti (a spray-painted line) at each end. Day was breaking as the boys drew up the outline of their piece on the wall. They had already been working at it for a while when Morg looked around. The first metro train would be along soon, and so might Security Concept too … Suddenly it was too much for Morg. ‘Let's go,’ he said.

The two boys felt danger approaching. Security guards? The mercenary himself? At night, paranoia can set in at any moment and get even the biggest, strongest and craziest tagger going. Even the tough Dekor. The two boys ran back to Tåsen, where Morg was staying the night at Dekor's place. Shortly before the two boys fell asleep, Morg said: ‘If we carry on like this, we're going to be really famous.’

The End of Morg

In his compendium, Anders wrote that he stopped tagging at the age of sixteen, but that is probably false. According to Dekor, they were eighteen years old that night at Vestgrensa station. Maybe there was a reason why Anders wished to alter this point from his past. Apart from his tagging, he was not especially prominent in the Tåsen Gang. He was no tough guy. When his face appeared in the newspapers in the summer of 2011, his old friends did not recognize him.

‘I've got a good memory for faces, but I didn't recognize Anders' face,’ said the man who used to be famous for his ashtrays. ‘Maybe because he was so anonymous. I really only remember one image of him from that period.’

There was often trouble and fighting at Dekor's parties, and on one occasion Anders was involved in such an incident, which he describes in his compendium. According to Breivik, the altercation was an example of an encounter with violent jihadists during his youth:

(Time: 23:30) – Assault and attempted robbery – Us 10, them 12 Moroccans. Location Tåsen, Oslo.

They were robbing (collecting Jizya) and beating local kafr/Norwegian kids at Tåsen Center, they had done this on numerous occasions. They didn't live there but travelled to Tåsen from a Muslim enclave on [sic] Oslo East. I was at a party on [sic] Tåsen when we heard they had just beaten one of my friends' younger brothers. We went there to chase them away from the neighbourhood. They had weapons, we had weapons. I was hit with a billiard [cue] in the head. Result of the fight: we made a deal with them, they promised they would never return and harass the Tåsen youngsters again.¹³

There are a number of interesting facets to the account of this incident. For one thing there is the use of religious terms such as jizya (a tax that was levied on non-Muslims in, for example, the Ottoman Empire) and kafr (an infidel) in relation to an ordinary incident of child delinquency.

It might appear as if something dawned on Breivik during the period when he read Fjordman's essays in the time after he had moved back to his mother's house in 2006. He began to understand his youth in the Islamic terms with which the online counter-jihadist milieu was so preoccupied. Theft by juvenile delinquents became jizya, lies became taqiyya (Koran-sanctioned deception to hide religious affiliation), while peaceable Norwegians became dhimmi (non-Muslims who live under sharia). The petty-criminal subculture of the nineties was reborn as a religious conflict.

But it was not only his use of terminology that showed that Anders had removed himself from the chaotic streets of Oslo and constructed his own virtual reality. The Tåsen lads who were involved in the same fight have a slightly different version of the scuffle at Tåsen's small shopping centre in the summer of 1997. ‘We were having a party at my place,’ Dekor recalled.

Then there was a phone call from a good friend of mine, a guy who was a year younger than us, who said he'd been robbed at the shopping centre. We gathered a bunch of people from the party and ran over there with some bats and pool cues. We stormed into the youth club at Tåsen, Action 22, which was in the basement of the shopping centre. ‘Come on then, you fucking Pakis!’ we shouted. But there were so fucking many of them, there were more of them than us. So we lost the initiative. People thought ‘uh-oh’ and just stood there, a bit perplexed. There was some brawling back and forth, and I got a smack from the guy who was the leader of the other gang. One of them took a pool cue off one of us and hit him with it. It wasn't Anders though, but the guy who liked white pride music. I think it was a red-haired Moroccan who did it, a crazy guy who came to Norway as a child straight from the mountains of Morocco, so people said. So we decided to leave it at that and went back to the party quietly and calmly. So we lost that time. Fights were always different. But there was no mention of any deal that they wouldn't come back. Things didn't work like that.

While Anders usually portrayed himself in a good light, he also often claimed he had been beaten up when it was not true. He claimed that Muslims broke his nose and hit him on the head with a pool cue. Maybe he felt a need to fabricate examples of jihad, maybe he was just expressing his feeling of humiliation, or maybe it was a kind of masochistic fantasy that came to him later. Instead of remembering his mistreatment as a young child, Breivik exaggerated trivial adolescent incidents. Psychoanalysts speak of ‘projective identification’, by which suppressed memories of childhood abuse might be transferred to other situations.¹⁴ By constructing a victim narrative in which Muslims are the assailants and he is the victim, perhaps Breivik was creating a picture of suppressed cruelty that he would later relate to as if it were real.

The Norwegian vigilantes of the Tåsen Gang were not quite as dominant as Anders wished to believe either. ‘We were shit-scared of the immigrants too,’ as one of the lads said.

The members of the Tåsen Gang were not, after all, as hardcore Norwegian and racist as their reputation suggested. Most of the boys had immigrant friends, and their hostility was directed more at concrete individuals or gangs than against specific skin colours, religions or ethnicities. Anders was a good school pupil and was intelligent, but he struggled to understand the ‘social game’. He never became a cool hip-hopper, he did not realize it would be wrong to tag on his end-of-school trip, and he did not understand that the situation in Oslo was more complicated than a black-and-white conflict between Norwegians and Muslims. If Anders had hung around longer with the Tåsen Gang, perhaps he would have remembered those months differently. It was not his lack of fighting skills that meant he lost all his brownie points with Dekor and the other lads. Neither was it his hip-hop past, as the Tåsen Gang listened not only to Nazi rock but also to ‘nigger music’, and some of them were even rappers.

In the summer of 1997 Oslo was blessed with sunshine, tanned bodies, warm water to swim in and house parties. The boys went diving in the fjord from Panteren, the cliffs on the west side of the city's Bygdøy peninsula. They were being watched from the rocks below by girls in bikinis. It was the perfect setting for a flirtation or a first kiss, or to try out more serious ideas. Anders had not had many dealings with girls, but that summer he met a girl who hung out with the Tåsen Gang, ‘Elin’. This must have been like hitting the social jackpot for him. After his lean years spent at Ris and Nissen, he now had a gang, a crew and a girl. It finally seemed as if he had made it socially, before the end of his strenuous teenage years. The ashtray man remembers seeing Anders and Elin walking hand in hand. Hand in hand?! Yes, hand in hand. That was the only clear memory he had of Anders.

The reason that left such an impression was that, in so doing, Anders sealed his fate with the Tåsen Gang.

Gangs are primitive organisms with clear rules about what you can do. This showed that Anders understood nothing of the rules that applied in the gang. ‘His error was that he hooked up with one of the Tåsen girls who was unpopular with our gang, one of the ugly girls,’ Dekor explained.

I remember thinking, ‘Huh? I thought he was cool, and then he ends up with her?!’ That made him lose all of his kudos. The ugliest girl of the lot. That made him lose face. He'd probably been regarded as quite cool since he dared to go out tagging and had done graffiti in the city centre. ‘Woah’, we thought when we heard that, ‘he's a tough cookie.’ But then he ended up with Elin and wasn't quite so cool after all.

Dekor laughed at their ruthless reasoning as youngsters, but back then it was real. Either you had cred or you were a nerd. If you lost your status, you were finished; the gang did not accept losers. This was basic social gaming knowledge in the Tåsen Gang. Morg did not understand the social game, so Anders left Tåsen probably at some point in the late summer of 1997, when he was starting third year at Oslo Commerce School. His relationship with Elin did not last long. She soon found another boyfriend, a Pakistani. She had become a ‘Paki whore’, according to the Tåsen Gang, who got into trouble again, this time with friends of Elin's boyfriend.

The gang gradually split up towards the end of upper secondary school, with the boys spread out at different schools and some having ended up out of town. For some of the boys, things snowballed into parties and drugs, and a couple of them ended up as junkies. The hip-hop group Klovner i kamp achieved nationwide fame, and most of the other lads did alright in various creative professions. The one who always put on neo-Nazi music at parties moved to the ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Holmlia with his children and his wife, who was the daughter of a Zimbabwean chieftain. Nobody remembered that anonymous boy from Skøyen with the thin voice and indistinct face until somebody phoned Dekor and said: ‘That guy on the front page of the papers, it's the guy who used to write “Morg”!’

‘It was a strange time back then,’ Dekor said.

I don't know if there are as many gangs or as much theft and conflict now. When the police wanted to question me, I wasn't sure to begin with, as I don't know anything about what Anders did. But then I started to think that it was worth trying to find out when things went wrong for him, what made him snap, in which case maybe those days are important. As for the conflict with the immigrants, the police wondered about those rapes, and of course I remember there were loads of rumours, but I don't know any more than that. They also wondered about that story of a girl having her face cut, which Anders wrote about in his compendium, but the only thing I've heard of that's similar is what happened to an acquaintance of mine at Sognsvann. She got in the middle of a fight and got a bottle in her face.

Dekor's face tells the story of the life he chose. After they finished having parties in Tåsen, Dekor moved downtown, and his twenties eventually became one long after-party. He took the lessons he had learnt while at school to the bars of the city centre. Wherever Dekor was, there would be trouble.

The left side of his face is split in two by a thick and jagged vertical scar from a broken bottle. Dekor did not win every battle, let alone every war, and there were even bigger and crazier lads in town than him. Above his left temple is another large scar, almost bulging out. Dekor never saw who did it. He was sitting at a bar when someone grabbed his shoulder and, as he turned round, a crowbar hit him as hard as a rock on the left side of his forehead. If the blow had been a couple of centimetres further down and to the left, it could have been life-threatening.

After having spent considerable time in prison for assault, Dekor gave up fighting in 2007. His schooldays finally came to an end, as far as he was concerned. Now he is a yoga instructor, a community worker and public speaker.

Somewhere inside most adults there still resides a high-school pupil, vulnerable, insecure and energetic. Adolescence is like an orienteering course without a map, in which you set off fumbling and have to solve problems along the way about sexuality, identity and belonging. Most of us eventually find our niche and a group to belong to. Anders' short appearance in the Tåsen Gang followed his usual pattern: he never quite became a full part of the group culture, remained an obscure presence on the periphery and vanished without leaving a trace. His signature as Morg quickly faded on the concrete walls. Nobody remembered the face of the boy who wanted to be ‘big’ and ‘really famous’ for his tagging. He arrived empty-handed and left equally empty-handed.

Perhaps a crack appeared in Anders' façade with the Tåsen Gang that summer. He started playing truant. The autumn of 1997 saw one of his first breakdowns. Until then he had followed the usual path at school, but now he started falling behind. People who want to make it big and be famous are likely to have frequent periods when they feel equally small and forgotten. Perhaps his journey from tagging towards the youth wing of the Progress Party and petty financial crime was accompanied by depressive episodes of varying duration.

Perhaps Breivik also drew the reasonable conclusion that he was not gang material and no street fighter and that he should seek out new groups to join. He was good at school, after all, disciplined like few others and good at planning. Maybe he had a future in business, self-employed or even as an entrepreneur. And what about politics? Completing his upper secondary examinations would be a good start, but Anders left the Commerce School in December 1997, half a year before the end. He did not tell Tove.

None of the teachers there remember this pupil who attended the school for a year and a half before dropping out a couple of months before his nineteenth birthday.

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 This chapter is based on interviews with acquaintances of Breivik from Ris Lower Secondary School, Hartvig Nissen Upper Secondary School and Oslo Commerce School, as well as from the tagging community and the ‘Tåsen Gang’. They have all been anonymized according to their own wishes. Contributions were made by four of Breivik's contemporaries from Ris, three people from the tagging community and two people from the Tåsen Gang, in addition to a few other sources. I have also made use of legal statements and police statements from some of Breivik's friends, as they were reproduced in the forensic psychiatrists' reports published online by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/.

2 ‘Heinrich Himmler på R.O.O.M.!’ [Heinrich Himmler at R.O.O.M.!], Ris avis: Ris Ungdomsskoles nettavis, 2008, www.risavis.net/Himmler_pa_room.htm.

3 Harald Ulvestad, ‘Om Ris skole under okkupasjonen’ [About Ris School during the occupation], Medlemsblad for Vinderen historielag, 16/1 (2007), 2–5.

4 Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway], ‘Hjulet: Styrings- og informasjonshjulet for helse- og sosialtjenesten i kommunene, 1996 [The hub: Management and information hub for health and social services in the municipalities, 1996], 31 December 1996, www.ssb.no/helse/statistikker/hjulet/aar/1996-12-31. See also similar statistical reports from 1995 to 1998.

5 Aslak Nore, ‘Kommentar: Oslo Noir’ [Comment: Oslo Noir], VG, 28 August 2011, www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/artikkel.php?artid=10098241.

6 This description is based on Tore Bjørgo and Thomas Haaland, Vold, konflikt og gjenger: En undersøkelse blant ungdomsskoleelever i Skedsmo kommune [Violence, conflict and gangs: An investigation among lower secondary school pupils in Skedsmo municipality] ([Oslo]: NIBR, 2001).

7 Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim, ‘Rettspsykriatisk erklæring’ [Forensic psychiatric report], 29 November 2011 (the first psychiatric report), reproduced by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/, p. 103.

8 It is difficult to find figures to substantiate this, but researchers who have studied juvenile crime confirm this impression, including Tore Bjørgo of the Norwegian Police University College in a discussion with me in early 2012.

9 Husby and Sørheim, p. 96.

10 Ibid., p. 36.

11 According to a source from Tåsen who knew Breivik in 1997.

12 2083, pp. 1389–90.

13 Ibid., p. 1394.

14 Sigmund Karterud, Theresa Wilberg and Øyvind Urnes, Personlighetspsykiatri [Personality psychiatry] (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2010), p. 63.