3
A West End Family1
Anders Behring Breivik's Childhood
‘The Fatherless Civilisation’2
This time, Tove was furious. Jens could be so strangely insensitive. There were few faults to find with him, as he was a great husband in many respects, but he could sometimes be distant and rigid, principled in the wrong way – like now. Anders himself was not making a big fuss about it. The little boy with his milky, almost transparent complexion sniffled and his narrow eyes ran, but he was not whining.
‘Come on!’ said Tove.
She stomped off down the gravel path with Anders in tow behind her, slammed the little white wooden gate shut after them and walked over to the car. She sat down behind the wheel, while Anders crawled into the back. In the mirror, Tove saw him put on his safety belt. His face was red because of the allergic reaction, and he was possibly upset too. She turned out onto the road, changed gear and set off for Cabourg.
Behind them was the little white summer cottage, an old half-timbered farmhouse with a thatched roof. On the lawn outside, which was as straight as an arrow, Jens Breivik walked along pushing the mower. Although Tove had asked him to wait to cut the grass until Anders had gone home, Jens had stuck to his guns. The grass had to be mown, irrespective of whether it made his little son from Norway poorly and gave him the sniffles.
Normandy was at its most beautiful in the summer holidays, but Tove was seething with rage. When the little boy visited them, surely Jens could change his routine. Anders did suffer when he had his attacks. He was a sensitive boy and cried the time they drove over a mouse. Anders was not with them very often: sometimes at the holiday cabin in Telemark and here at the cottage in Bassenville. There was a farm nearby, and Anders was always thrilled to see the animals. He was sweet and well mannered, easy to deal with, confident and happy when guests came and played badminton with him. A wary and slightly meticulous boy who looked up to his father but stuck close to her, his step-mother.
The road wound between dense spinneys, past green openings and yellow fields on the way towards Caen. The first time Tove had met Jens Breivik was in London in the sixties, twenty years earlier. Tove had more or less done a runner from a summer job at a psychiatric hospital. She was in her early twenties and was fed up with the hospital. Tove thought it was the English doctors and nurses who were the real lunatics at the asylum. It was no place for her. She loved being in England but had to find something else to do. She turned up at the Norwegian Embassy to borrow the phone book, where she met a man staring at her with scrutinizing eyes. ‘Can you type?’ he asked.
It was Jens Breivik. That question would be the start of a career in Norwegian diplomatic missions that would last forty years and take her from London via New Orleans to Ankara and Shanghai. She met Jens again many years later, and this time they got married. That was in 1983. The same year, they ended up in court in Oslo in an attempt to obtain custody of Anders. For some time it actually looked as if the four-year-old might end up with his father and Tove in their diplomatic residence flat in Paris.
Tove looked up at the mirror again.
‘Are you feeling bad?’
‘Don't ask,’ he answered, all grown-up.
‘We're going to Cabourg,’ said Tove. ‘First to McDonald's and then to the beach. OK?’
‘You're really nice, Tove,’ Anders smiled from the back seat.
A Suspicious Smile
‘Anders has become a contact-adverse, slightly anxious, passive child, but with a manic kind of defence, restlessly active and with a feigned, aversive smile […]. It will be very important to take steps at an early stage to prevent the boy developing more serious psychopathology,’ wrote a psychologist from Statens senter for barne- og ungdomspsykiatri [the State Centre for Child and Youth Psychiatry; SSBU] in March 1983, in an application to Barnevernet [the Child Welfare Service] for Anders to be given a foster home.3
The team from the SSBU responsible for reporting on the case were extremely concerned. They were of the opinion that the boy was subject to a deficit of parental care and concluded that he should be taken away from his mother. This was a rare and dramatic recommendation from the SSBU, presented in slightly woolly professional terms. An ‘insufficient care situation’?
The portrait of the four-year-old with a ‘feigned, aversive smile’ dates from around the same time that Jens and Tove got married in London. In this period, Jens also received telephone calls from Oslo.4 It was his ex-wife's neighbours, who told him they had heard noises from her flat, and that the little boy and his half-sister were often home alone in the evenings. Something was wrong in the small family, which from the outside did not appear particularly unusual: a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties with two timid, blond children.
Anders Behring Breivik was born in Oslo on 13 February 1979 and moved to London as a baby. His father, Jens Breivik, was originally from northern Norway and came ‘from a strict background with little communication in the family’.5 He trained in business administration and economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen and became a diplomat.
Anders' mother, Wenche Behring, was a thirty-three-year-old auxiliary nurse from Kragerø in Telemark. They appeared to be a typical couple of the generation of 1968: a social climber from northern Norway who had made it all the way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thanks to the revolution in education, and his princess from southern Norway. Both of them were incomers to Oslo with no close family in the area and, in a way, were true children of the post-war Labour Party state's social mobility and opportunities. As a diplomat, Jens Breivik served governments of both socialist and conservative persuasions, but he was an ardent Labour Party man himself.6 The couple both had children from previous relationships; Jens had two sons and a daughter, while Wenche had a six-year-old daughter.
The marriage between Jens and Wenche was short-lived. Anders' parents separated when he was one and a half, and his mother moved back to Norway together with her two children, taking up residence in Jens Breivik's ministerial accommodation in Fritzners Gate, a short street just behind Frogner Church. Wenche saw her ex-husband as a monster, a ‘devil’ incarnate,7 while he thought that she was ‘mad’ and impossible to talk with.8
The conflict did not end with their separation, and, in the years that followed, the little boy became a battlefield for his parents and eventually an apple of discord. Jens saw little of his son over the next few years, even when he was in Oslo, but he tried to support him and his ex-wife financially.
When Anders was two years old, in the summer of 1981, Wenche contacted the social care office to ask for help. She explained that she did not have any family or social network in Oslo, she was physically and mentally worn out, and she thought that Anders was a demanding child, ‘restless and lately more and more violent, capricious and full of unpredictable quirks’. She often worked double shifts, she said, and took many night shifts to make ends meet. She asked for weekend respite care for Anders.
The application was granted a few months later, but the arrangement did not work well, and Wenche ended it because ‘the home did not suit Anders’. The respite care family reacted badly to the mother, according to the SSBU report, seeing her as strange and difficult. They told the social care office of bizarre incidents.9
But this was only the beginning of an acutely difficult home situation. The relationship between Anders and his mother was full of violent conflicts and tearful reconciliations. Wenche was apparently quite unstable. She could be furious with the little boy one moment, only to shower him with affection immediately afterwards. ‘Double communication’ was how the SSBU later characterized it: she pushed the boy away and pulled him towards her in a way that was extremely confusing for him.
It seemed as if Anders was paying dearly for the difficult relationship between his parents: his mother took sides with his big sister and attacked Anders.10 She treated him as if he were an extension of the despised Jens.11 Even if the boy was neither mentally nor physically disabled, was he perhaps a demanding child after all? It was as if he had an unquenchable thirst. His mother was concerned about how he would gulp down his red fruit-juice drink and wondered whether he might be diabetic. She felt provoked by his smile, which she saw as inappropriate, condescending and disdainful. Since Anders was only three years old, disdainful and condescending were strange adjectives to use, but Wenche's frustration about the difficult connection with her son was maybe not just down to her alone.
In the autumn of 1982, Wenche and her children moved into a modern flat with five rooms in the Nedre Silkestrå housing co-operative. Jens had lent a hand with the deposit, perhaps quietly hoping that more spacious and pleasant surroundings might help to calm the situation. The family was in contact with the family welfare centre in Christies Gate several times, where they were especially concerned about Anders, as they believed that ‘in emergency situations it would be tremendously difficult for the mother to deal with’ her son. The mother described her three-year-old boy as ‘aggressive, clingy and hyperactive’.
In early 1983, she contacted the family welfare centre again and was referred to the SSBU at Gaustad, where the small family was admitted for observation in the day unit for all of three weeks in February 1983. When they arrived, Wenche appeared disorientated, demanding and suspicious. She could not find the way up the hill from Gaustad, even though there was really only one road to take. She was preoccupied with money and demanded that the SSBU pay for taxis for her and her children throughout the rest of their stay. A team of eight people, including a psychologist and a senior consultant in psychiatry, observed how the family functioned together and how they functioned alone in other contexts.
Anders spent his fourth birthday with the SSBU. He was tested in many contexts and, among other things, spent a number of sessions in the supervised playroom. He went into a room with a sandbox, as well as boxes containing various toys, dolls and a drawing table. Against the wall was the ‘world in a cupboard’, a cupboard with many different little figures of animals and people, including people from different nations, soldiers and Indians. Through play, the boy would act out his inner world and show what he was thinking about while at the same time demonstrating how he related to the observer who was with him. Normally, children would find their way to the toys that interested them, take them over to the sandbox and play with them. All the toys made it possible for children to depict conflicts and situations that might characterize their own lives. But, over the course of the sessions Anders spent in the playroom, not much happened. Some of the time he would sit passively among all the toys. Other times he would wander about restlessly. He kept his distance from the specialist who was in the room with him.
It was as if the boy did not know how to play. When he played shop games with other children, it was ‘the functioning of the till that interested him, not the game around it. [He] lacks imagination and empathy.’ Although his language was ‘well developed’, the SSBU concluded that ‘he has difficulties expressing himself emotionally […] and is almost entirely lacking in spontaneity or elements of joy or pleasure’. An inability to express emotions is known by psychologists as alexithymia.
How could it be that this little boy, who otherwise had ‘well-developed language’, was not able to put words to his feelings? Was it because he was unable to articulate himself, or was it because he had nothing to articulate?
In child psychiatry, there has been an increasing focus on the concept of attachment.12 In short, attachment theory is a theory of psychological development which claims that children undergo a critical phase of development in the period from when they are about six months old until they are about three. During this period, the brain develops quickly and the foundations are laid for how the child, and later the adult, will relate to other people. A child's relationships with its parents or other central care-givers are decisive factors in this developmental stage. When a parent comforts an anxious child, this gives the child security, but if the child seeks out its mother (or father) in order to be comforted, and experiences rejection, neglect or punishment, this creates insecurity.
If in this critical phase children consistently receive inadequate responses to their needs, the probability dramatically increases that they will be given a serious psychiatric diagnosis later in life. This phenomenon is known as a lack of maternal care (even though the primary care-giver does not necessarily have to be the mother – it could be the father or other adults). Play observation was one of the tests that indicated that Anders lacked basic security and had poor attachment; he was ‘contact-adverse’, as the psychologist wrote. He lacked a strategy for relating to his mother or other adults, and would wander around. In psychiatry, this is called a disorganized attachment pattern, a relatively typical form of behaviour when ‘the harbour of security is, at the same time, the source of fear’.13 There was nothing wrong with the boy's intelligence; he was not mentally impaired. His problem lay elsewhere, and was reminiscent of what would later be found in studies of Romanian orphans.
Anders was not given any diagnosis by the SSBU, but he was described as a ‘divergent’ child, and the picture the team painted of the little boy brings to mind partly what is today described as reactive attachment disorder (RAD), a relatively rare and serious diagnosis.14 There is little research into how children with attachment disorders develop over their childhood and adolescence and on into adulthood. The little that has been done suggests that, although most have problems (it appears that there is a tendency towards narcissism and lack of empathy), there is considerable variation in the effects of poor attachment.
One of the interesting aspects of attachment theory, according to the psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy, is that it can explain transgenerational effects – in other words, why parents’ (especially mothers’) attachment patterns are inherited.15 Fonagy also links empathy to attachment. He claims that attachment is a decisive factor in the development of a self-image and an ability to think about internal mental states, both those of others and one's own.16 Fonagy calls this ability ‘mentalizing’. As soon as a child understands that its mother is a separate individual from itself, it tries to anticipate or understand what its mother thinks and feels. The child mentalizes. This is the first step in the development of empathy, but, if a child does not feel that it is safe to imagine what its mother is thinking or feeling, this development will stall. A poor mentalizing ability can lead to misunderstanding social situations, a lack of empathy, and perhaps seeing oneself as empty or as a zombie.
The observation team from the SSBU described Anders as ‘mildly pedantic’ and ‘extremely neat’, thereby hinting at a nervous boy with signs of compulsive behaviour. But, although he was a ‘slightly anxious, passive child’, they still thought that he could function ‘relatively normally’ together with other children and with adults. The SSBU concluded that ‘Anders has contact abilities’, which ruled out extensive developmental disorders such as classic autism. Their concerns about him were due mainly to his home conditions – in other words, his relationship with his mother. Since Anders grew up without his father, his mother was his only carer.
Even though the focus of this old case was on Anders, it also painted a picture of an unsettled and possibly unbalanced woman. When the little boy's mother described him as ‘aggressive’ and ‘clingy’ – which he may have been, although this was not observed by others – perhaps she was also painting a kind of self-portrait. This self-portrait was confirmed by the SSBU, which described how she confused the boy by alternately pushing him away and pulling him towards her. The mother was ‘uncritical’, unable to see herself in the situation: everything was other people's fault. She was not able to set predictable boundaries and limits for her little boy. There was often a lot of noise at home, as if from partying, while at other times the young children were left home alone. Either one thing or its polar opposite. Black and white. Rage and remorse. For a child, unstable and unpredictable behaviour from their closest care-giver can be just as emotionally destructive as living with an aggressive or violent parent.
Psychiatrists call this emotional abuse, and research suggests that the long-term effects of such a ‘deficit of care’ can be just as serious as physical abuse. In later life, these children are at much greater risk of mental illnesses and suicide. Even when child welfare and child psychiatrists perform major interventions, the results are relatively poor. Children who have experienced poor attachment in the first years of their life will by the age of eight normally be restless and unpopular, with poor social skills. In adolescence, they will frequently become ‘aggressive towards friends, also when they eventually fall in love, and they will often be rejected. They will nonetheless describe themselves as much more popular than they are, and there is much to suggest that they have particular problems understanding social interactions and reading other people's feelings.’17 The consequences of poor attachment are not always easy to spot. Intelligent people may periodically be able to hide their problems, either partially or completely. Disciplined people unable to read social interactions can still train themselves in social skills. Sooner or later, however, the consequences are brought to light.
The SSBU thought that Anders was subject to a deficit of care from his mother. They recommended the most drastic measure at the disposal of child welfare: taking him into care. Taking children away from their parents into care is something that happens in Norway only in exceptional circumstances. It can be traumatic for parents and children alike, and is recommended only in emergencies. In 2006, there were 7,292 children living in foster homes and 1,386 in child welfare institutions,18 which equates to approximately 0.5 per cent of children in the country. Many of them, however, were moved out of their homes without having to resort to compulsory care orders or intervention by child welfare. In 1983, it is likely that the figures were considerably lower.
Anders’ situation was, therefore, quite unusual. He might not have been one in a thousand, but he was not far off. In a number of cases, a deficit of care can be situational. The mother might be temporarily depressed after giving birth or after a break-up. A difficult financial situation and a weak social network can make the situation even more challenging. Alcohol or substance abuse might feature. All these problems may be temporary or situational, but, if the SSBU reached the conclusion they did, this was because they did not think things would change in this small family, so the report entails quite an unambiguous judgement of the mother's ability as a carer. Anders’ mother could not deal with him, she felt provoked and was practically falling apart, so the SSBU thought it would be best for everyone, including the mother, if he were placed in a foster home. Even though his sister did not present the same kind of challenge to his mother and avoided more of the conflicts at home, the SSBU recommended that child welfare keep an eye on her development too.
Anders’ mother was on an emotional rollercoaster, although, according to the SSBU, she calmed down a little during the period she stayed at Gaustad. She requested a respite home but cut off the arrangement. She agreed to a foster home placement but changed her mind. She complained about a lack of support from Jens Breivik but did not say that he was helping the family financially. She wanted assistance from the boy's father but flatly rejected him when he came onto the scene in the custody case. Although she sought out help, she described the boy as the problem: she was worn out because he was ‘demanding’. Anders may have been demanding, but there were two people in their relationship, and the mother was apparently incapable of self-reflection in any meaningful way. She was an innocent victim, as she saw it, and maybe in some ways she was.
In the SSBU account, the mother appears as a person with problems far beyond being worn out, isolated and in a difficult financial situation. If her problems were caused by her challenging situation or by depression after her separation and after Anders’ birth, a change in behaviour or a glimpse of self-insight might have been expected. Psychologists link statements of the type ‘I hate you, don't leave me’ to what is known as a borderline or emotionally unstable personality. Such people can have normal intelligence but may appear in many ways like children – immature. These are people who often function poorly in relationships with their families, who have mood swings and poor impulse control, who see things in black and white, who are unable to put themselves in other people's shoes and who have little self-insight.
Immaturity in parents and a resultant deficit of care often originates in the parents’ own upbringing, as Fonagy indicated. Many might have lost parents at a young age, while others will have grown up with depressed, violent or immature (borderline) parents of their own. According to the SSBU's generally carefully worded account, which was based mainly on information provided by her, Wenche Behring had herself had an ‘extremely challenging upbringing, initially with physical illness and later mental illness in the form of her mother's paranoid delusions’. Her mother came from ‘an affluent home’ in the West End of Oslo but married a master bricklayer in Kragerø, a small town on the coast to the south of Oslo. Her mother caught polio while she was pregnant with Wenche and had to use a wheelchair, for which she apparently later blamed her daughter. Wenche's father died when she was young. She had a close relative who was disabled, which was a matter of stigma. Disabilities were to be hidden; it was important to keep up a façade.
It could, therefore, appear as if Anders Behring Breivik had a genetic disposition towards mental illness on his mother's side and also figured as part of a chain of attachment-related disorders spanning generations. His mother could almost appear as an aggressor in her relationship to her young son, but, from another point of view, she was a victim herself. Parental rejection is linked to aggression in adulthood. A rejected child stores anger and hatred almost like a pressure cooker that can burst at any given moment. Perhaps Anders’ birth triggered a depression that brought anger and hatred to the surface. This chaos emerged when Wenche could not find the way to the SSBU.
Together, Anders and his mother wandered around like aliens on Earth, visitors from another planet who could not understand what they should feel or what they should do in the playroom. They were united in a deeply ambivalent relationship, occasionally escaping restlessly to seek confirmation from the outside world, but always finding their way back to each other.
In May 1983, child welfare backed up the SSBU's conclusion that Anders should go to a foster home. At the same time, Jens got in touch from Paris, trying to find out what was happening in Oslo. Concerned neighbours convinced him and Tove that the situation at home was excessively turbulent for the young boy. When Jens came on the scene, Wenche became intransigent. She opposed not only the compulsory care order but also the compromise suggested by child welfare of another weekend respite home for Anders.
In spite of the SSBU's unambiguous and robust recommendations that Anders should be removed from his home, his mother's refusal was the turning point in the case. Wenche Behring mobilized all her efforts in the fight against her ex-husband.19 In August, when Jens gained access to the SSBU report in its entirety, the neighbours’ warnings were confirmed. After having read the dramatic description of his son's conditions, he demanded custody of Anders. Wenche refused, and the conflict ended up in court that autumn.
‘Do you like children?’ the judge asked Tove in court in October 1983.
Maybe he was not convinced that Anders’ step-mother would be there for him. The judge was an elderly man, a representative of the post-war generation, and possibly also of 1950s values and principles.20 In addition, he was going by the judicial precedent by which the presumption of maternal custody applied in family law cases. According to this rule, the mother was seen as the principal carer. The child was in practice hers, while the father and the state child psychiatrists came second. Besides, the mother had contacted the authorities herself to seek help, and, if she was so terrible, why had the SSBU not asked for the half-sister to be taken away from her mother too?
On the mother's side, a nursery manager testified that Anders was functioning well at nursery. According to a source from the SSBU, this testimony was contrary to the report from the head of section in the nursery who had day-to-day responsibility for Anders, which apparently echoed the findings of the SSBU and described a boy with problems. The judge sat in his black robes listening to the testimony of the eloquent and much younger psychologist from the SSBU. The polite sitting hid a generational conflict in which the old view of family collided with the 1968 generation's individualistic opinion that the child should be the focus. The judge also had to decide to what extent the new technocracy of state child psychiatry should be brought to bear and how far the influence of the state should extend to the family. What was a family?
In spite of the SSBU's conclusion regarding a deficit of care and its unambiguous recommendation that Anders’ situation had to be changed, the court ruled in favour of the mother. The verdict was in line with the strong position of mothers in family cases. Wenche had her revenge on Jens. The judge appointed two experts to report on the case (at the cost of the claimant – i.e., the father) and decided that Anders would stay with his mother for the time being. The report would be expensive for Jens, and the outcome would be uncertain.
Jens and Tove withdrew their claim, and their lawyer wrote that ‘they would like to have Anders if his current situation is unsatisfactory, but they do not wish to tarnish his current situation in order to obtain him’. Jens underlined that his wish to take on custody of his son still stood. If the relevant authorities thought that Anders’ situation was unsatisfactory, he wrote, it was their responsibility to do something about it. The SSBU commented on the judgement in a letter on 28 October 1983: ‘We stand by our conclusion that Anders’ care situation is so unsound that he is in danger of developing a more serious psychopathology.’ At the same time, this implicitly states that the boy was already suffering from psychopathology, that he had mental problems to a certain degree, even though the SSBU did not make any clear diagnosis.
Such a note of concern on the SSBU's part was very unusual – yet another expression of how seriously the experts viewed the situation, and perhaps also an expression of their irritation at having been disregarded by the judge. As a result, the case went back to child welfare, which carried out another report in early 1984.
The child welfare report from April 1984, based on three visits to the family's new home, described what appeared to be a different family. Once again, Anders’ smile caught the attention of the social worker, but it was ascribed the opposite value to the SSBU's ‘feigned, aversive smile’. Anders ‘was a pleasant, relaxed boy with a warm smile that makes him instantly likeable’, wrote the caseworker. Anders and his sister were ‘well-mannered’, and Anders played nice and quietly with Plasticine and Playmobil. The SSBU had thought the boy did not know how to play, but now he was showing a different face. Or was it just a façade? His mother was ‘in control’. She did not ‘change her expression or get agitated in difficult situations’ with Anders.
In this account there is an implicit description of how the mother had been seen before, as someone who changed her expression, who became agitated and who was not in control. A worn-out single mother, not very resourceful and practically without any support from her children's fathers. But the housing co-operative on the edge of Frognerparken [Frogner Park] was a delightful place in springtime, and the flat was very spacious for the small family. How much of this was a façade and what was behind it? Was the mother really in control of the small family at Silkestrå? And what was her little boy really like?
The young Anders’ smile, like that of the Mona Lisa, is open to interpretation. The ‘feigned, aversive’ smile has now become ‘warm’, making him ‘instantly likeable’. Anders had good reports from the nursery in Frogner Park. There was apparently nothing remarkable to observe about him. Since his home situation appeared stable, child welfare concluded that he should stay with his mother, but they introduced a cautious supervision measure, which meant monthly home visits. The caseworker indicated the possibility that new crises might arise, and that Wenche could be quite temperamental and indecisive: ‘We base our proposal for supervision on the fact that the mother has repeatedly made requests asking for help in emergencies, e.g., help to have her children put into foster homes, weekend homes etc., and that she has then often changed her mind regarding the necessity and usefulness of this.’ But even this measure was not put into action. Child welfare dropped the case, which had been based on a note of concern from the SSBU, just two months later. There was no particular reason except that the mother said she did not need any further supervision, intervention or help.
The years went by. The small family seemed to get on well. Had something serious really happened between them in the early eighties? Perhaps the SSBU team had been frightened of their own shadows. What was really hidden in their dossier? After all, it was the mother who had taken the initiative to ask for assistance and help. The thought of what might have happened if child welfare had taken the report from the SSBU more seriously, or if the judge had ruled in favour of the father, became an increasingly irrelevant ‘if’.
According to Tove, Anders never mentioned this topic again. His memories of his earliest years had gone, he said. But, even if it is true that he has forgotten his early childhood, his experiences may not necessarily just have vanished. They could have consequences in the form of ‘uneven development’, according to attachment theory and to the SSBU. Childhood traumas can be like fermenting sourdough, a dark source of shame and hatred. Talking with the court-appointed psychiatrists in prison, Breivik stated that he could not remember his care situation being evaluated by the SSBU, but he knew that there had been a custody case and that it probably would have been best if his father and Tove had won, so that he could have lived with them.
Since those years, however, Breivik has mainly been keen to maintain his successful West End façade. For the most part, his description of his time at Silkestrå is like a rose-tinted sales brochure. Breivik later wrote about his childhood in his compendium: ‘[A]ll in all, I consider myself privileged and I feel I have had a privileged upbringing with responsible and intelligent people around me.’21
The Dark Sources
The place-name Hoff indicates there was once a pagan temple near Skøyen. A thousand years ago, the towering ash trees shielding Nedre Silkestrå were used to hang up sacrifices to the Norse gods, whether these were dead animals or perhaps people, but then the Norse religion was banished with sword and axe by an aggressive religion originating from the Mediterranean, namely Christianity. New names were coined, such as Abbediengen [literally ‘abbey meadow’] and street names such as Konventveien [‘Convent Street’] and Priorveien [‘Priory Street’], after the monastic property in the area during the High Middle Ages. The area went from being a sacred grove where Thor and Freyr were worshipped to pastureland and a herb garden for the monks from the island of Hovedøya.
Nedre Silkestrå was just beyond Frogner Park and had the character of a paradise garden. Anders and the other children ran and cycled freely along the paths between the yellow houses or disappeared among lush thickets of lilacs and raspberry bushes. A tawny owl shrieked on dark August nights. The landscape was neither a sacred grove nor a monastic garden any more, but because of the rich deciduous woodland – with ash, elm and poplar – the municipality of Oslo had given the woods around Silkestrå the status of a protected biotope. Behind the wooden fences of Konventveien were beautiful villa façades of brick, stucco and painted panels.
Tending to façades is not an unusual activity among the tennis courts and fruit trees of Oslo's West End. The area's aura of success was reflected in wealth statistics.22 The West End also glittered with cultural capital and the discreet inheritance of state-building patricians. Of course, success is measured not just in terms of the number of boats people own, the location of their holiday cabins or how many acres their gardens have. A career and a good education are also important. Christian Tybring-Gjedde, the leader of the Oslo branch of the Progress Party, lived at Smestad and had studied at Loyola University Chicago. The foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, had gone to Ris Lower Secondary School, studied in Paris at the elite Institut d’études politiques, known as Sciences Po, and later worked at Harvard.
The higher up you are, the further there is to fall and the longer the shadows you cast. The West End is quite simply not a good place to fail. Breivik describes his West End background as being like a hallmark: ‘I'm from the West side of Oslo, and most of my current friends are from privileged families (middle or higher middle class). There are many factors that separate us from lesser privileged families on the East side. The essential factors are the ethics and principles you adapt in your community.’23
Wilfred ‘Little Lord’ Sagen is the ultimate West End character in Norwegian literature. De mørke kilder [The dark sources] was the title chosen by Johan Borgen for his 1956 novel depicting this Norwegian Nazi. Wilfred grew up in a rich man's home where he apparently lacked nothing, apart from one thing. His father committed suicide when Wilfred was young, and even though the Little Lord has the perfect exterior, there is darkness within him. He has to be the best at everything. He plays the role of a polite, affable and promising young pillar of society with great talents, but in the evenings he sneaks out.
The gifted young pianist is a gang leader. Since he does not have any real heart or personality, only playing roles, he never grows up and never becomes an individual. Instead, he is split, or doubled, to borrow terms from psychoanalysis. The Little Lord re-emerges at night as a brutal pack animal. He beats up an old Jew and ends up being robbed by two working-class lads while on a drinking spree in the East End's Grünerløkka, in what is probably the first literary depiction of child thieves in Oslo. Borgen describes this Norwegian Nazi as the result not only of a split consciousness but also of a split city: the East End and West End are like night and day.
The psychological fall down into the abyss of Nazism has its sociological response in the fear of being declassed. The potential comedown hangs over the young Sagen heir like a sword of Damocles, and Nazism is his solution. The Little Lord's exploits in Grünerløkka took place almost a hundred years ago, but the city is still split today if you look at election results and research into living conditions. In the West End, life expectancy is longer, income is higher, the constituents are whiter and the election results are a deeper shade of blue – in other words, more conservative.
On an August day in 1986, Anders stood with his satchel on his back at Smestad Primary School. It was his first day, and, as he peered up at the large, yellow, brick building, he may have known that both King Harald and his son, Crown Prince Haakon Magnus, had been pupils there when they were young princes. Although Anders appeared to be a normal, happy boy who was good at school, according to his step-mother Tove he would later resent school. Like many of the children of parents from the 1968 generation, Anders was critical of what he regarded as their legacy. A shadow fell over his school years, but it is difficult to say whether that was in the late eighties or later.
At Smestad, as he later wrote, Anders remembered ‘being forced to complete mandatory knitting and sewing courses’:
These courses were first implemented in various Western European countries as a result of Marxist revolution which started all the way back in the 1930s but had its climax around 1968. These mandatory knitting and sewing courses were implemented with the goal of deliberately contribute [sic] to feminise European boys in their insane quest to attempt to create the Marxist utopia consisting of ‘true equality between the sexes’. I remember I dreaded these courses as it felt very unnatural and was a complete waste of time.24
As it appeared to Anders later, or at least as he described it in his compendium, there were many things that were the fault of the so-called ’68ers.
The meticulous young boy, who knew about clothes and colour combinations from an early age and who lived with his mum and big sister, later felt that he had been ‘feminized’, as if he had been contaminated by effeminacy, softness and feelings. He saw a connection between the ’68ers and decay not only at school or for the European man, but also with regard to morality and sexuality.
‘An alarming number of young girls in Oslo, Norway start giving oral sex from the age of 11 to 12,’25 he wrote – in other words, while they were still at primary school, which in Norway lasts until the age of thirteen. ‘I feel shame on behalf of my city, my country and my civilisation. I loathe the post war conservatives for not being able to halt the Marxist Cultural Revolution manifested through the ’68 generation.’26 Although he viewed his childhood through blurry lenses and the factual basis of his assessment is dubious, the consequences for him – ‘shame’ and ‘loathing’ – could be just as real.
Breivik, a child of ’68er parents, felt shame and loathing towards the thought of the Norway constructed by the generation of 1968, and the Norway towards which he later expressed such hatred was described largely as a gendered being: as a woman – emotional, unstable, promiscuous. Was this perhaps the nightmare vision of his own worn-out mother in the early eighties?
As I gradually went deeper into Breivik's compendium, I came closer to his own upbringing. The most emotionally charged sections deal with his anger and frustration towards women generally and his mother in particular. Breivik described how the decay caused by the ’68ers had affected his own family. Both his mother and his father were apparently ’68ers. His mother was also a feminist, he thought. ‘I have had a privileged upbringing with responsible and intelligent people around me,’ Breivik wrote, while at the same time having a bad word to say about all of them. The army officer who was his mother's partner while Breivik was a teenager was ‘likeable’, but also ‘a very primitive sexual beast’.27
As for his mother and his sister, he left no stone unturned in describing how the moral decay let loose by the ’68ers had influenced their behaviour and health. In a harangue about sexual morality and sexually transmitted diseases, he brought them in, describing their sex lives and subsequent health problems. He concluded by saying that his mother and sister ‘have not only shamed me but they have shamed themselves and our family. A family that was broken in the first place due to secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution.’28
Parents' sins are visited upon their children. The description of his family is personal and brutal, written in a kind of moral rage. He was also a victim of moral deterioration, he thought, since his mother and sister had brought shame on him.
What according to Anders was a normal middle-class background emerges at the same time as a complicated family picture characterized by constant ruptures and great distances. The 1968 generation's concept of a ‘fragmented family’ is present to an almost caricatured degree: Breivik grew up in a maelstrom of half-siblings, ex-step-parents and various families with which he was half-connected. Tove was concerned about this aspect of his upbringing. It would be hard for any child, and it was remarkable that Anders took it so well.
‘One day Jens will be proud of me,’ said Anders, who always thought positively.
Strangely enough, the only one of Anders' close relatives who gets away more or less scot-free from the fury of the compendium is his father. ‘The thing is that he is just not very good with people,’ Anders wrote apologetically. But the reality was that Jens Breivik left his son to his own devices, especially after he separated from Tove. Throughout his upbringing, Anders’ step-mother emerges as his only normal adult point of reference. It was when she came into his father's life that Jens took the initiative to seek custody of his son and, later, to spend time with him. When she disappeared, his relationship with his teenage son also came to an end. Jens broke off contact, which he later blamed on Anders. But Tove, who met up with Anders and with his half-siblings, understood some of the children's resentment towards Jens. They tried contacting him but were rejected. Jens Breivik was a distant and absent father. And this was a source of conflict, not just between Jens and his children, but also in Jens and Tove's life together.
The Cats of Ayia Napa
There was a squeak – a peculiar, raspy sound that appeared to be coming from somewhere far away, yet at the same time nearby. Tove was wide awake now, and blinked in the darkness of the hotel room. She heard Anders moving in the other bed. He was awake too. Tove switched on the bedside light, and there was that squeaking yet again. There was no question: the sound was coming from somewhere in their room. Tove and Anders looked at each other.
‘What is it?’ asked Anders. He was fourteen years old, no longer a boy and on the cusp of adolescence.
‘I think’, Tove said, ‘I think there's something under your bed.’
Anders’ bed was against the wall. Tove switched on the main light. They bent down and Tove carefully lifted the sheet hanging down from his mattress. There was something small and dark beneath his bed. A head and some paws. It was a cat, and there was something hanging out of it. The cat mewed again, a hideous sound, and Tove suddenly realized what was going on. It was giving birth. The small lumps next to the mother were kittens.
‘Oh dear,’ said Tove.
‘Cool!’ said Anders.
‘Please, Tove,’ Anders pleaded the next morning, ‘do you have to tell them? Can't I just keep one of the little kittens?’ But Tove was adamant. She went down to reception and asked them to remove the cats.
Anders was completely fascinated by the little family beneath his bed, so small and helpless, and Tove was not sure whether he had slept at all that night. He stared at the shivering blind lumps of life and watched the mother licking them clean and lifting them by the scruffs of their necks. The kittens made their first, trembling movements. Their small voices mewed. They crawled up against their mother, blind and seeking out warmth. Gradually, the small balls of fluff dried off. There was fur on the unprotected bodies lying at their mother's side, drinking their first meal. The mystery of life. The kittens lay against their mother in a fan formation, like a crystal formed of the will to live. None of them were bigger than the palm of his hand. Perhaps he wanted to give one of the small kittens a home in Oslo – care for it, give it warmth, look after it. Because what would happen to them here? Would their mother be able to look after her small family? How would the small kittens fare? Perhaps there was something exciting about such a defenceless creature. You could do whatever you wanted with it. But it was no use begging. The cat family was gone when they returned to their room that evening.
In the winter of 1993, Tove separated from Jens Breivik, but she stressed that she did not want to lose contact with his children, especially the youngest, Anders, with whom she had always got on well. She had sat him on her lap when he was little, treated him as her own child. She decided to take him with her on an Easter holiday to do something he would enjoy. While Anders’ classmates at Ris Lower Secondary School sat in traffic on their way up to their families’ holiday cabins in the mountains, he and his step-mother went on board a charter flight to Ayia Napa in Cyprus. All the packing and organizing had gone well, as Tove had always been on good terms with Anders’ mother.
The days they were in Cyprus went by in a flash. They stayed at a hotel right by the beach, and the water was already warm. They had been taking holidays together for ten years, and Tove knew well what Anders liked to do. He was older now, and more daring. Tove watched in surprise as Anders zoomed about by the beach on a jet ski, sending the water spraying. Although he was a careful boy, he had another side too. At Smestad Primary School, he was one of the cool kids in the Skøyen Killers gang. He was active and quick-witted in many ways. Anders was adept at fixing all kinds of technical things, sorting out settings on TVs or video machines when they went wrong. He had evidently learnt something from the computer games in which he was so interested. Tove had a soft spot for the types who did well at school, and Anders reminded her a little of his father in that way: he knew a lot of things and used foreign words as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They travelled around a lot and only came back to the hotel in the evenings, tired and happy.
In Larnaca, they went up to the demarcation line, the border between the Turkish and Greek parts of Cyprus. There were watch-towers, barbed wire and barriers, remains of the war that had raged in the seventies. The border was like a weak echo of the iron curtain that had divided Europe into two ideological camps for forty-five years and had just been dismantled: a small and forgotten provincial version of Checkpoint Charlie. The churches on the Greek side stood directly across from the mosques on the Turkish side. Tove gazed across the border pensively, looking at the roofs on the Muslim side. Turkey: that was where she was headed. Her next posting from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was at the Norwegian Embassy in Ankara. Another chapter of her life was around the corner, and Jens Breivik was no longer part of the story.
Anders was not very interested in the geopolitical drama visible with the ruins and the soldiers, as well as the backdrop of historical conflict between Christianity and Islam. Big, black sunglasses under his blond fringe. His white skin was exposed to the Mediterranean sun, but Tove made sure that he did not get burnt. On their way back to Ayia Napa, he went across to her. He reached out his hand. ‘Here you go,’ he said, opening his hand. In his palm was a small key-ring. Tove picked it up and peered at the picture in the plastic disc attached to the ring.
‘Thank you!’ she said happily. The picture showed a nude woman stepping out of a shell, partly wrapped in her long, brown hair. It had to be a Greek goddess. ‘What's the picture of?’ Tove asked.
‘Don't you recognize her?’ Anders said a little reproachfully. ‘It's Aphrodite.’ The goddess of love, no less. The boy was certainly growing, Tove thought to herself. He was entering puberty now.
There was only one time Tove got cross. She had hired a small moped for Anders on the condition that it would only be used while she was there, but boys will be boys. When she found out that Anders had borrowed the moped without asking and driven around by himself, she gave him quite an earful. ‘That was really bad of you!’ she said angrily. ‘We had a deal!’
Anders hung his head. The boy was not used to boundaries. At home he did what he wanted to, and he was always good and easy-going with Tove. She had never needed to tell him off. Pranks had never been his style, but now he was getting a talking-to and was very sorry. He promised not to do it again, and Tove softened up when she saw his remorseful face. Borrowing the little moped with a shopping basket on its handlebars was no major crime, after all. It was the first time she had come into conflict with Anders, but he took it well.
Afterwards, everything was back to normal, and the usual light atmosphere quickly came back. Anders was open and chatty, but never confided anything, and he did not like to talk about sad or difficult things. ‘Don't ask,’ he had said that time she inquired whether he was feeling bad because of his allergy.
Tove drew a deep breath as their aircraft descended and started its approach to Oslo Airport, Fornebu. Their stay on the island of love had been a pleasant departure from everyday life, but now she was about to start a new life in Ankara. She would not see much of Anders for a while now. And how would the relationship between him and his father go without her? In any case he was not a child any more; he was a teenager now and would find his own path at Ris School. Who would have thought that this bright lad with his knowledge of Greek mythology had been treated as one in a thousand by child psychiatrists? But he was not completely grown up. Even on their way onto the flight, he had spoken about the kitten he could have taken home. It was as if he were obsessed with the little family that had come into being under his bed.
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 written and oral sources, principally interviews with Tove, who was married to Breivik's father from 1983 to 1993, and two members of the observation team from Statens senter for barne- og ungdomspsykiatri [the State Centre for Child and Youth Psychiatry] which reported on Breivik, his mother and his sister in 1983 (both are bound by their duty of confidentiality but were able to describe the report in general terms), as well as two other sources who were closely acquainted with the family during this period. I have also made use of material from the reports by the two pairs of court-appointed psychiatrists that have been reproduced by VG in a redacted form: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/.
2 One of the texts in Anders' compendium is entitled ‘The Fatherless Civilisation’. It was written by his favourite blogger, the extreme right-winger from Ålesund, Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, alias Fjordman.
3 Agnar Aspaas and Terje Tørrissen, ‘Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring’ [Forensic psychiatric report], 10 April 2012 (the second psychiatric report), reproduced by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/, p. 8.
4 Interview with Tove.
5 Aspaas and Tørrissen, p. 151. It is not clear what the source was for this description.
6 Interview with Tove.
7 Interview with source closely acquainted with the family.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 The following is partly based on Berit Grøholt, Hilchen Sommerschild and Ida Garløv, Lærebok i barnepsykiatri [Child psychiatry textbook], 4th edn (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2008).
13 Sigmund Karterud, Theresa Wilberg and Øyvind Urnes, Personlighetspsykiatri [Personality psychiatry] (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2010), p. 65.
14 One member of the SSBU team thought that this was the diagnosis they would have given him in 1983, if such a diagnosis had existed then. The SSBU was, for that matter, perhaps more preoccupied with providing thorough individual descriptions of cases than making diagnoses that can often be slightly imprecise instruments: reality is more nuanced than the diagnostic manual, as the psychiatric reports on Breivik demonstrated. Moreover, many of the most central diagnostic tools and test methods in child psychiatry have been developed since 1983.
15 Peter Fonagy, ‘Transgenerational Consistencies of Attachment: A New Theory’, Paper presented to the Developmental and Psychoanalytic Discussion Group, American Psychoanalytic Association Meeting, Washington, DC, 13 May 1999, http://dspp.com/papers/fonagy2.htm.
16 Karterud, Wilberg and Urnes, p. 58.
17 Grøholt, Sommerschild and Garløv, p. 348.
18 Ibid.
19 Interview with source closely acquainted with the family.
20 Interview with source from the SSBU who followed the court case.
21 2083, p. 1387.
22 According to the Norwegian tax administration, the average income for thirty-year-olds in Skøyen (Nedre Silkestrå, 0375 Oslo) in 2009 was just under 400,000 kroner (approximately £45,000), which was almost double the national average for all age groups.
23 2083, p. 1371.
24 Ibid., p. 854.
25 Ibid., p. 1170. It is quite doubtful whether Breivik was correct that an ‘alarming number of young girls’ in Oslo's primary schools are ‘giving’ (or having) oral sex. According to the statistics from the 2003 Ung i Norge [Young in Norway] survey, 12 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls stated that they had had intercourse, 16 per cent had carried out sexual acts in the sense of touching sexual organs, while 52 per cent had French kissed or ‘snogged’.
26 Ibid., p. 1171.
27 Ibid., p. 1387.
28 Ibid., p. 1172.