2
Bacardi Razz
Skaugum
In mid-July 2011, the regular customer turned up for a last drink at Skaugum, an open-air bar at the back of the Palace Grill near Solli Plass in the West End of Oslo. It was the middle of the week, but there was little difference between weekdays and the weekend when everyone was on holiday. When the weather dried up, people flocked to bars and cafés like swarms of ants. The man pushed his way forward through striped shirts, hoodies and lace tops to order a Bacardi Razz, a sugary raspberry-flavoured rum that in Oslo's West End bars is often mixed with Sprite, decorated with a slice of lime and called a Butterfly.
The customer was quiet and polite as usual.1 He was a typical West End boy, or man, of the sort that were two a penny at Skaugum, and he did not stand out apart from being less drunk and loud-mouthed than most of the others. He was medium height, blond and with an average build, in good shape. The bartender remembered the customer well from his days at Oslo Commerce School, one of the neighbouring buildings, in the late nineties. Over the years, as his hair slowly became thinner and his jaws rounder, he had continued to come back to the Palace Grill.
Most of the other boys from the nineties had got degrees and careers, grown up and settled down, but this regular customer had not followed the usual path from the Commerce School to a secure job in trade or industry. He did not have to pick anyone up from nursery at four o'clock and did not get up at seven to go to work. Some take longer to find themselves, and an unmistakeable aura of interrupted studies and failed business ventures surrounded the customer at the bar. ‘Get rich or die tryin’, he had said to his acquaintances in the Progress Party youth wing early in the noughties, quoting the rapper 50 Cent.2 But he was not much richer on this mild summer evening ten years later than he was back then.
Some of his businesses had made something, while others had gone quite badly. He had earned good money selling cheap phone call packages and fake diplomas, but his friends were still laughing about some of his ideas. For several months he had worked on his ‘unemployed academic’ project. He had developed a prototype of a pedal-driven billboard by putting together a bike and a newspaper cart. His idea was to take on an unemployed academic (of whom there were plenty, he thought) to cycle the vehicle with the billboard round Oslo: mobile advertising or, alternatively, ads-on-wheels.
It did not go well. The wind blew the cart over on the very first day, sending the billboard flying off to hit a woman. The ‘unemployed academic’ project was abandoned after its maiden voyage. Maybe his ideas were a little too big. The plan was not only about earning money but perhaps more about humiliating academics. Even though his friends thought he was enterprising, he was often strange and obstinate.3 An odd eccentric who wore sunglasses around town, even though it looked peculiar in the evening, and who was perpetually vain, wearing a Canada Goose-branded down jacket in the winter or with his shirt collar folded up under his Lacoste jumpers. A metrosexual, as he said himself. Before he went out, he put on make-up. He was considering hair transplants and dental bleaching. He had a nose job done when he was twenty.
The man paid for his drink with a 200 kroner note, smiled and said that he did not need all the change.
The Palace Grill popped up in 1988, a casual alternative behind the neat West End façade of Solli Plass. My friends and I hung out there back then, pale university students in our dark leather jackets. By the summer of 2011, the Palace consisted of an American-inspired bar with a substantial selection of beers and whiskies and a reputable restaurant, as well as the outdoor bar in the courtyard called Skaugum, named after the crown prince and crown princess's family residence in Asker – maybe because the royals themselves used to show up in the courtyard there on occasion.
The place's alternative character gave way to an elegant West End watering hole where a composite mixture of local residents quenched their thirst. While the Palace Grill was frequently visited by A-list and B-list celebrities, cultural and media figures in their thirties, Skaugum was where student hipsters, dark horses in the financial sector and more anonymous representatives of the West End's alcopop generation hung out under the open sky.
For almost twenty-five years, the Palace Grill had endured as a cultured alternative to the sleek concept establishments that stretched out in a golden crescent from Solli Plass up to the neighbourhood of Majorstua and then down Bogstadveien. There you could meet damaged West End characters drinking away the last remains of their grandparents’ inheritance and saying that they would soon get their big break as designers, open a gourmet food shop or publish their manuscript that would solve all the world's problems.
This regular patron did not always go home quite so early or behave quite so well. There was something intense about him, which sometimes got out of hand.
At the turn of the year, he had been out on the town a fair bit and managed to get thrown out of the Palace Grill after having bothered one of the other customers. A TV star in his forties, known for his wicked humour and unrestrained behaviour, noticed that the thin-haired and blond regular customer was staring at him. The men nodded to each other, and the young, blond man came straight across to him. ‘Anders Behring Breivik, nice to meet you,’ the man introduced himself, speaking in his refined West End manner.
It was an uncomfortable conversation. Breivik immediately began lecturing about Muslims and immigration policy. The celebrity tried to signal that he was not interested. Breivik spoke about crusades and Knights Templar. There was something strange about him. It was difficult to put it into words, but it was something that could be felt. A kind of stiffness. A kind of flatness. Did he say he was writing a book? His face was almost expressionless, except for that artificial smile. His voice was toneless, his eyes stared and he blinked a lot. He sat on his chair as if he were sedated, not making a single spontaneous movement. It seemed as if his body were shut, closed off, like a condemned building.
The atmosphere eventually became so awkward that the celebrity called the bouncers. Breivik was led away, but he managed to turn round. ‘In one year's time, I'll be three times as famous as you,’ he said, before the bouncers pushed him out onto the street.4
Scenes like that are also two a penny in the West End of Oslo. There is often little distance between those who are famous and those who are not, but who would like to be. Celebrities must expect to be recognized, for good or for bad. Not all wannabes can master the codes of the West End, let alone the art of conversation. Groupies are not necessarily girls.
Breivik's parting remark did not appear especially likely and was more like typical hot air from an awkward bluffer with delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex. Social skills are an art that requires constant practice, as Breivik himself thought, acknowledging that he had been out of practice for the past few years.5 He was looking to boost his ego, being a bit of an attention whore, as he said. Maybe it was his lack of practice that made him go on monomaniacally about Knights Templar that evening, or maybe it was the combination of alcohol and anabolic steroids. Breivik took steroids on a regular basis.
Not only was he a monomaniac, he also spoke about something quite odd: knights. Although the Knights Templar have become a popular cultural phenomenon after having been resurrected in, for example, the computer game Assassin's Creed, crusaders have not been a common topic of conversation in Norway over the nine hundred years that have elapsed since King Sigurd I Magnusson led his military expedition to the Mediterranean.
In the manuscript Breivik was writing – the ‘compendium’ as he called it – the spirit of the age came in for harsh judgement. He called the superficial and money-orientated culture he saw around him at Skaugum the ‘Sex and the City lifestyle’. Over the last few years he had been concerned about the ‘corrosive’ effect of celebrity culture.6 That was not how it was in the days of the Knights Templar.
The role of celebrities had changed as a result of the Internet, reality TV and social media. Breivik's generation was the spearhead in the democratization of fame. Carpenters and teachers – completely ordinary people – were suddenly perfect celebrities. Now that anybody could suddenly become famous, perhaps the pressure to do so also increased, and new arenas for showing off and for being seen were opening up, with blogs, chat rooms, Twitter and Facebook. The media's gaze used to be aimed at a select few, whereas the eyes of social media were, in principle, on everyone.
Unknown wannabes approached the celebrities in bars in the hope that a bit of their aura would rub off on them. A good celebrity story could increase the unknown individual's social status, like a character in a computer game who gets increased powers by acquiring a new weapon or a powerful spell.
Breivik took part in ‘the game’ to a certain degree even if he had secretly become critical of it, and to some extent critical of himself. ‘I am not going to act like a hypocrite and pretend I have not been influenced by the typical Sex and the City lifestyle,’ he wrote. ‘I have been under the influence of this lifestyle as [have] a majority of my friends and even my own family members. I used to be proud of my “achievements”.’7
In his compendium, he wrote about how this had changed. In September 2006, he moved out from his bachelor pad and back into his old room in his mother's flat. He and his mother had a complicated history. Breivik was a mummy's boy, but at the same time he was concerned about his façade: how things looked and what people would think. Even in his compendium, he became a little defensive when he described what it was like to move back in. His motivation, he claimed, was his lack of money.
[J]ust before I started writing this compendium, I decided to move from my apartment in Frogner, one of the most priciest [sic] areas in Oslo, home to my mother. […] The cost of renting my old apartment was 1,250 euro. My current accommodation expenditure (food included) is 450 euro […]. This wouldn't have worked in my old life, when I was an egotistical career cynic as it would devastate my social image […] (the pursuit to project a desirable façade to impress friends and potential mating partners). Sure, some people will think you are a freak for living with your parents at the age of 31 […]. The only thing that matters is to ensure that you have enough funds and free time to complete the objectives necessary to execute your individual mission. As for keeping secrecy while living with another person; sure, you need many cover stories and you need access to the loft and/or basement storage areas.8
Things are not always as they appear. ‘Your individual mission.’ Even among the rich and the diplomats' sons in the West End of Oslo, there are people in cellars pursuing their solitary dreams, storing things in secrecy and surrounding themselves with layer upon layer of cover stories, like spiders in dusty bomb shelters.
The anonymous regular customer at the bar was in reality two people. In his compendium, at the same time as denouncing his former self, he described his transformation from a ‘career cynic’ to a knight equipped with a monumental mission. To signal the metamorphosis that was taking place, he signed the compendium not as Anders Behring Breivik, but as Andrew Berwick. Maybe he was not totally uninfluenced by the Sex and the City lifestyle after all, or at least by the desire to be seen and appreciated when he went out on the town.
The Consumer Zombie
Even though he might cling to celebrities, it was not easy to uncover any dark sides to the polite bar customer, but, one time he was at the Palace Grill, he cracked. One Thursday evening in October 2010, he arrived at the bar early. Apart from a woman in her late thirties, Breivik was alone. Breivik was a social guy, in his own way, so he treated the woman to a beer and started talking with her.
‘Knights,’ he said, explaining what his book was about. The woman's friends came in and sat down. She was a literary researcher and began conversing with Breivik, who readily told her that he was inspired by chivalric literature.9 He had never heard of The Song of Roland, but he knew that Ivanhoe was a novel about knights.
‘My book's going to be big,’ he said.
‘What kind of genre is it’, she asked, ‘if it's not a novel?’
‘It's a masterpiece,’ Breivik explained.
The literary scholar tried to help him out and asked if it was fiction or non-fiction. Breivik answered with a reply that explained nothing at all. Either he did not understand the question and was not able to answer it, or he did not want to answer – mysterious. She did not understand what kind of book the strange guy's masterpiece was. When he said that he did not have a publisher, she stopped asking. Hardly an undiscovered genius, more of a slightly simple young man, she concluded, a show-off who had maybe done a few interrupted semesters at the Oslo School of Management.
The evening was young, and more of her friends were on their way. Breivik had not displayed his whole register yet. ‘Novels about knights,’ she thought, ‘whatever next?’ Without knowing it, she was on to something about the slippery salesman character at the other side of the table, but she had already forgotten his name.
History's most famous knight was never knighted by a monarch or a pope; he was self-appointed. Four hundred years ago, a man by the name of Alonso Quijano from La Mancha put a basin on his head and rode out into the world on an old nag he named Rocinante. The poor and childless man had read so many chivalric novels that he had begun to believe them. He took the name Don Quixote and was ready to fight bandits and save damsels in distress.
The conflict between the protagonist's fantasies about himself and other people's more level-headed opinions about the old man is the main theme of Cervantes’ novel about the great narcissist of world literature, the Knight of the Ill-Favoured Face. With his lance lowered, Don Quixote charged at what he thought was a giant, only to be thrown to the ground by the sails of a windmill. To use an image from the psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, the narcissistic mind alternates between floating over the waters like an inflated Zeppelin and lying on the ground like the smoking wreckage of the Hindenburg.
Don Quixote's knightly character was constructed in a library in the early 1600s, while Breivik's knight, Andrew Berwick, was formed, dressed and armed on the Internet between 2006 and 2011. In spite of a difference in age of four hundred years, there are similarities between the two knights. Andrew Berwick also has a host of modern relatives. The Breivik/Berwick duo resemble characters described by many contemporary authors on both sides of the Atlantic, possibly because Anders Behring Breivik was even more a child of his time than many others. In a way, he had no real parents.
In his compendium – the ‘masterpiece’ – Breivik emerges as the consumer society's prodigal son, a loser in the capitalist battleground, a gamer who cannot distinguish reality from fantasies born online. The compendium describes two different people: a wakeful, political and active Justiciar Knight and a dormant, passive and unconscious consumer, almost like the plot of The Matrix, a film to which he frequently refers.
One of the pictures he has included in the compendium shows a face with its eyelids sewn shut and a scalpel approaching to cut the threads. This picture is related to his frequent use of opposed concepts such as sleeping vs. waking and living vs. dead. Both the sleeping and the waking Breivik could have walked right out of novels by Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk – a ‘Norwegian Psycho’, a person who is almost totally superficial and empty, whose best friends are not people, but brands. Breitling Crosswind, Chanel Platinum Égoïste and Château Kirwan ’79 were respectively Breivik's favourite possession (a watch), his favourite eau de toilette and the wine he had put aside for a final party with two luxury prostitutes.10 If a genre were to be suggested for the compendium, a notion of consumerist prose would come close.
Breivik writes about his miserable imprisonment as a cog in an enormous capitalist machine, in which people are seemingly free but in reality enslaved; in which people are seemingly part of a society but in reality are not bound to other people, not even to those who are enduring the same glossy hell as them, in the soft but deadly embrace of money. It is a self-portrait of homo consumens. Breivik, the dopamine wreck, is alive on the outside but dead inside. The smiling bar customer behind his glass, chatty and seeking contact, is empty, cold and dead beneath the surface. In his compendium, Breivik condemned the spirit of the age, in what at the same time emerged as a dark self-portrait. In the following paragraphs he writes ‘you’, but in all probability means ‘I’. Breivik describes his former self as:
a zombie where the highlight of your day is purchasing a 1,000 euro garment or a 100 euro sushi meal, or getting a blowjob from someone you met outside the toilet at a club that Saturday. On your way home you see a girl getting gang-raped by 4 Somalis. You don't offer it much thought as the slag probably had it coming anyway … Why should you risk your health for someone you don't know? And the poor Somalis are probably only acting out [sic] as a result of centuries of European colonialism. Poor fellas. Society should take responsibility and offer these underprivileged individuals better accommodations [sic] and more rights, perhaps affirmative action would ensure that they feel at home, that they finally would like us? How can we be so cruel and treat them this way?
You work 9–10 hours a day, come home, eat, work out a couple of hours to keep fit, take your regular tanning, spa and Botox session and don't really have time for much else. Your concerns are not for the well-being of your family – close or extended – your neighbours, your kinsmen or countrymen, about the outlook for your country or your compassion for others, but rather the frightening scenario of being alone in this world. You don't want children because in essence you are a child yourself without responsibility or concern for anyone but yourself. Your only concern is how you can get your next dopamine fix, through and [sic] endless spiral of feeding your own ego.11
A zombie – in other words, the living dead. Here Breivik apparently summarizes his life in the noughties before he moved back to his mother's home in 2006, giving up the ‘rat race’. He appears as the consumer incarnate, restlessly looking out for his ‘next dopamine fix’ in the form of a new piece of clothing or some plastic surgery. Dopamine is a pheromone at the centre of the brain's reward system – nature's own drug, you could say. It is activated by love, for example, but also, as with Breivik, by shopping. Breivik describes himself as a monomaniacal addict, as he was addicted to the bottle of red fruit-juice drink which allegedly went everywhere with him as a little boy. He is a child, as he says, not a grown man. Beneath his well-groomed exterior is a personality with no depth or substance. He is a puppet in the hands of forces that want him to work more, buy more and not waste time on other things.
Lurking in the background is his notion of sexually and physically aggressive immigrants, Somalis who gang-rape a girl, who represent not only a threat, but maybe also a fantasy of a different and more direct form of masculinity. The gang-rape represents the promise of fellowship in a group, the need for a violent reaction and an unaffected, sadistic hatred of women. Breivik's compendium portrays the process of the consumer zombie being cleaved open, giving rise to a violent, terrorist monster.
‘I'm Going to Kill You!’
Either Breivik did not pick up the signals from the two women at the Palace Grill that his presence was no longer desired, or he did not care. He stayed sitting there, jovial and smiling.
When the third friend turned up, a beautiful, blonde, Nordic-looking woman, it was as if Breivik changed gear. He became insistent. He started off generous and courteous, although the group of friends made it clear that was enough. Breivik realized that being chivalrous was not working and began to boast. He ignored the first two women and repeated that his book was a masterpiece, but the blonde was not impressed.
Although he was talkative and generous in a calculated way, there was something strange and aloof about him. An icy shudder. Even though he was neither entirely ugly nor completely out of it, the chance of him chatting anybody up was out of the question, no matter how much he hassled them. The fourth friend arrived and, in an attempt to get away from Breivik, the friends went out into the courtyard.
Skaugum was closed and dark, but Breivik followed them. His positive chat-up techniques had been unsuccessful, and he now followed the blonde with an air of menace, stalking her. He went up close to her and glowered at her fiercely and intensely. It looked more strange than frightening. The fourth friend started dancing round him in the dark courtyard, waving her shawl and her dress, like a torero around a bull – or perhaps like a windmill in front of a knight? It was a comical scene.
‘I'm going to kill you!’ Breivik shouted.
The friends laughed and went back into the warmth and light of the Palace Grill. They spoke no more about the would-be author. If he had been a foreigner, they might have thought about his threat, but since he was just an unsuccessful white guy they laughed it off. What a freak. He did not really seem amorous either, just strangely obsessed with the blondest member of the bunch.12
Once again Breivik had been involved in an episode typical of Oslo's social life. Only someone who had read his compendium would have sensed a connection between Breivik's behaviour and a deeply ambivalent relationship with women, and especially with blondes who resembled his own sister and mother. This time, he was angered by rejection. He clung to famous men too, but it was women he threatened to kill. ‘Traitor whores,’ Breivik growled in the compendium.
In his diary entry from October 2010, which was a part of the compendium, Breivik gave a slightly different version of the incident: ‘As for girlfriends; I do get the occasional lead, or the occasional girl making a move, especially now a day [sic] as I'm fit like hell and feel great. But I'm trying to avoid relationships as it would only complicate my plans and it may jeopardize my operation. And I don't feel comfortable manipulating girls any more into one night stands. I am not that person any more.’13
Perhaps this is the chaste knight Berwick talking, or maybe Breivik saw that it would be difficult to take girls home to his mother's flat? In the compendium, unseen by the outside world and surrounded by his cover story, Breivik lived out his fantasies. Dream and reality blended into one. His operation was no dream about a blonde-haired woman, but a nightmare of violence. ‘Violence is the mother of change,’ he wrote.14
A similar development from a lonely life of consumerism to a split life and terror is depicted in Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club and in David Fincher's film of the same title from 1999. Palahniuk's protagonist is nameless, a sign of his fundamental lack of identity and of the notion that he is not an individual in a traditional sense, but a new type of subject: born of money and brought up with a life of shopping.
Although he does not realize it himself, Palahniuk's nameless protagonist develops an alter ego by the name of Tyler Durden, who is a free, active, politically subversive and alert character, just like Breivik's Justiciar Knight. ‘We are a generation of men raised by women,’ says Tyler. When Tyler eventually tells the protagonist that they are the same person, he also points out all the advantages of this fantasy – in other words, the advantages of himself: ‘I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not.’
Breivik's many aliases and online nicknames might also be expressions of ‘a confused identity perception’,15 just as his many cover stories suggest a confused perception of reality. A loved child has many names, according to a Norwegian proverb, but so does a person with no clear identity, as he or she can change his or her name at any time. Fight Club ends with the divided protagonist carrying out a massive terrorist operation, eventually bringing buildings down around him like a house of cards. The aim of the 950 kg of homemade explosives in Breivik's van was to topple the H Block, but, even though the bomb shook the government district, it did not manage to move the foundations.
Breivik's hedonistic past as a ‘career cynic’ resembles the background of many European jihadists, including some of the men behind 9/11. It is worth pondering whether it is easier for such zombies in consumer society to be radicalized, whether they have fewer aversions and are more open to buying into extremist and violent ideas online. The technological shrinkage of the world and the collapse of old value systems and symbolic narratives (such as religion, family and the nation-state) create a new man in Palahniuk's novel, not unlike the way in which totalitarian ideologies attempted to make a new communist or fascist man. The methods are softer and more subtle, but they still involve a form of invasion of or encroachment on the individuals who end up in the melting pot of consumer society.
This leads to a reaction, to rage, but there is no father to kill, no ideology to overturn or state to oppose. The consumer zombie's prison has no guards. This rage, then, either finds its expression in purposeless acts of terrorism and aimless urban vandalism or is turned inwards in the form of depression. Even if consumer zombies have no feeling of guilt towards others and are not troubled by conscience, they are still ashamed of themselves, in a kind of frustration about their own inadequacy in the marketplace. This shame is difficult to deal with because it cannot be relieved by confessing to others, and the solution is either another ‘dopamine fix, through [an] endless spiral of feeding your own ego’, as Breivik put it, or, as in Fight Club, carrying out a personal crusade.
The Herostratic Tradition
‘In one year's time, I'll be three times as famous as you,’ Breivik told the TV star. Even though reality TV elevated many ordinary people to celebrity status every year, the question remained: how would Breivik become famous? By writing to the newspapers? Breivik described himself to like-minded people online as a ‘cultural conservative’ intellectual, the opposite of ‘cultural Marxists’ writing opinion pieces for the papers. As a former paperboy, Breivik had worked out that newspaper carts could be used for mobile advertising. He also knew that a household deity turned up on the doormats of Oslo's West End every morning, and that god was called Aftenposten. People who got their names into Aftenposten were guaranteed attention at breakfast tables from Solli Plass all the way up to Holmenkollen. The only problem was that it was difficult to get in: 90 per cent of contributions were rejected at any one time.
Could he make a lot of money? That was difficult too. Be extremely handsome? Even after a load of operations, most of us still have some way to go there. Sport? You need talent. Blogging and social media? Some people managed. The extreme right-wing intellectual Fjordman, for example: a Norwegian man with a decent command of English who called Stoltenberg's government ‘the most dhimmi […] of all Western governments’. Fjordman made a name for himself not only in Norway but throughout Europe. ‘Our own Fjordman is about to come in at third place among the most recognized/influential European anti-Jihad/anti-multiculti/anti-Marxist intellectuals/bloggers,’ Breivik wrote enthusiastically in November 2009. ‘I know it's hard to be a prophet in your own land but this is beyond all expectations. Congratulations Fjordman!;)’16
Fjordman was not to everybody's liking. He and those of the same opinion had been to some extent ridiculed in what Breivik called ‘the mainstream media’, but, within his niche, Fjordman was a big name. Fjordman was proof that culturally conservative intellectuals could find success outside Aftenposten. He was one of Breivik's great role models and, without knowing it, a kind of godfather for Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick, Knights Templar Europe. It was a matter of finding your own niche. But Fjordman also had some kind of talent. What about those who did not?
The Fjordman phenomenon arose, according to himself, as a reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. It would become the decade of terrorism, and so-called warblogs sprang up online like mushrooms. The shockwaves from 9/11 led to the faces of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta being broadcast across the world. Europeans and Americans alike saw Islam in a new light. At the monitor in his bedroom, Breivik read Inspire, the English-language magazine of al-Qaeda, and watched videos of the terrorist network's bloodstained exploits.
There were many sides to the destruction of the twin towers, in terms of religion, society, politics and the media. The philosopher André Glucksmann also saw in the events in Manhattan an echo of Herostratus’ ancient crime.17 Behind the crime lay the criminals’ desire to be seen, remembered and forever feared.
According to ancient tradition, Herostratus was an unknown citizen of Ephesus in Asia Minor. He was obsessed with his desire to be seen and remembered, but he had no gifts or talents. As a result, in the year 356 bc, he burnt down the city's Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Herostratus was arrested, tortured and executed. The city of Ephesus made his memory taboo. His name would not be uttered or remembered: Herostratus would be punished not only by death but by being forgotten. Nevertheless, even the writers of the time overlooked the Ephesian ban, meaning that the expression Herostratic fame is a term that we still use.
Ancient writers saw two motives behind such meaningless destruction: the craving for eternal fame and the envy of mediocrity. The destruction was also a kind of art in itself, the expression of a pitch-black, negative aesthetic: burning the most beautiful thing on earth was awful, meaningless and astonishing at the same time. In the centuries and millennia since, many have followed in Herostratus’ footsteps, professing the aesthetic of destruction, and many of them have also defined themselves, or been defined, as terrorists. Breivik's compendium was a veritable catalogue of expressions, methods and tales from the history of terrorism, and many Herostratic terrorists were not entirely unlike the man who boasted at the Palace Grill.
A few years after US incendiaries had obliterated Tokyo and the atomic bombs had struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's most important religious building, Kinkaku-ji, Kyoto's Temple of the Golden Pavilion, also burnt down. The temple caught fire on 2 July 1950, and within a few hours the wooden building had been reduced to ashes. It was not the occupying US forces that had destroyed the shrine. The police arrested a twenty-two-year-old monk from the temple, Hayashi Yoken, who immediately admitted to the crime. A few months earlier, he had boasted to a prostitute in Kyoto that he ‘might be in the newspapers soon’. Hayashi was known as a stubborn recluse, and during the court case it emerged that he felt that the other monks maligned and ridiculed him. He said that he was jealous of the beautiful temple and decided to destroy it in order ‘to do something big’. The forensic psychiatrists established that he was paranoid and schizophrenic (the diagnosis was based, among other things, on the absurdity of Hayashi's crime). Nevertheless, Hayashi was sent to prison and to confinement in a psychiatric facility, where he died a few years later.
The best-known account of this incident is Yukio Mishima's documentary novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the first draft of which bore the title ‘Jealous of Beauty’. In Mishima's novel, the young monk is ugly, sickly and has a stammer. He is an outsider from early childhood. ‘As can easily be imagined, a youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes,’ Mishima's monk says. ‘On the one hand I enjoyed imagining how one by one I would wreak punishment on my teachers and schoolmates who daily tormented me; on the other hand, I fancied myself as a great artist, endowed with the clearest vision – a veritable sovereign of the inner world.’18
The monk grows up in the shadow of the temple and eventually begins to hate it. ‘Beautiful things […] are now my most deadly enemies,’ he says, before finally burning down the temple.19 For Mishima, the fire is not only an expression of the stuttering monk's self-hate, his hatred towards beauty and his fantasies of power. On one level, the fire was a way of freeing himself from earthly beauty by destroying it, a kind of mystical and violent liberation related to suicide. But Mishima's fire is also connected to self-hate in occupied Japan, which in the early post-war period was indeed a burnt-out ruin. The burning temple was the ultimate gesture of powerlessness, the gospel of defeat.
Herostratus' successors throughout history have not been satisfied merely with destruction. Ancient writers pointed to a connection between destroying an iconic building and killing a prominent leader: both crimes are motivated by the perpetrator's desire to acquire the victim's fame. A number of assassins of recent times belong to the Herostratic tradition, and many of them have had similar psychiatric diagnoses to Hayashi. Some of them did also become celebrities themselves by killing or attempting to kill another celebrity, and are therefore celebrity killers in two senses. Some of the best-known cases are from the USA.
‘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.
From the roundabout by Skøyen station, Breivik followed Hoffsveien on towards Hoff. Maybe he threw a glance back towards Skøyen bus depot, where once he had become king of the number 32 bus? Hoff was still in the West End, but the detached villas here were mixed with flats and workers’ houses. Factory workers had once lived here. They spoke a different sociolect from the indigenous population and built a People's House as a kind of socialist Trojan horse in the surrounding Conservative Party country.
Breivik set off on the last few metres home, crossing the tramlines by Hoff station and continuing past the Coop Mega supermarket up towards the anonymous low-rise building where his mother lived. When he reached home, he let himself into the ground-floor flat. Breivik went into his messy room. The computer was whirring. Long curtains concealed the window. From the wall, colourful, cartoonish and slightly disturbing faces by the graffiti artist Coderock stared down at him. The paintings were a memento of Breivik's own time as an ‘artist’ on Oslo's concrete walls, buses and metro carriages.
Breivik was tired after busy weeks with little sleep. The last week before the ‘operation’ was spent travelling back and forth to the farm at Åsta, a couple of hours north from Oslo, by train and taxi and hire car. He had already finished making a new Facebook profile, which said that he was a Christian and liked hunting, and set up a Twitter account in which he cited John Stuart Mill: ‘One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.’
This was only a part of the press pack that Breivik had prepared. The video was already done, ready to be uploaded, but the compendium, his 1,500-page pet project, the key to his distinctive split mind and one of the most remarkable testimonies that has ever been written in Norway, was still not ready. This enormous, disorganized manuscript pointed not only forward to his ‘operation’ but also, in a way, back to his childhood.
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 Torgeir P. Krokfjord, Anders Holth Johansen, Sindre Granly Meldalen and Frode Hansen, ‘Breivik festet på kjendisbar natta før massemordet’ [Breivik partied at celebrity bar the night before the mass murder], Dagbladet, 19 August 2011, www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/19/nyheter/anders_behring_breivik/innenriks/terror/terrorangrepet/17724429/. According to one of the Dagbladet journalists who worked on the story, their source later told them that Breivik had not been at Skaugum the evening before, as the article states, but another day that week.
2 Breivik's entries on the forum of the Progress Party youth wing (Fremskrittspartiets Ungdom; FPU) were to be found online but have since been removed: http://fpu.no/2011/08/anders-behring-breiviks-debattinnlegg/.
3 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/, pp. 36, 38, 105–6.
4 See note 1 above. The depiction of Breivik is based on Husby and Sørheim's description of his body language.
5 Andrew Berwick [Anders Behring Breivik], 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence (hereinafter referred to as 2083), p. 1401.
6 Ibid., p. 687.
7 Ibid., p. 1171.
8 Ibid., pp. 1424–5.
9 This literary scholar is an acquaintance of mine.
10 2083, pp. 1406, 1434.
11 Ibid., pp. 1401–2.
12 This episode is retold based on an interview with the literary scholar who met Breivik that evening.
13 2083, p. 1424.
14 Ibid., p. 839.
15 To borrow a term from the court-appointed psychiatrists Husby and Sørheim.
16 In a comment on Document.no. Breivik's comments on Document.no can be found at www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/.
17 André Glucksmann, Dostoïevski à Manhattan (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), p. 24.
18 Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, trans. Ivan Morris (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 5.
19 Ibid., p. 204.
20 Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), p. 79.
21 Ibid., p. 82.
22 Ibid., p. 104.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
24 2083, p. 1371.
25 Ibid., p. 1424.