A Norwegian Tragedy

4

Morning on Utøya

Utopia on the Tyrifjord

600 metres is not far, but when it is 600 metres of water it suddenly becomes a gap to cross. In summertime, the lake island of Utøya lies like a green brooch on the wavy blue breast of the Tyrifjord. On the lake's eastern side, the land rises steeply up rocky wooded paths and red cliffs towards the forest of Krokskogen, where the trees on the edge look like grass on a roof shielding Utøya from the morning sun. To the west, the blue fjord stretches out for 10 kilometres towards gently undulating agricultural land and rolling woodlands.

The round blue shape of Norefjell rises on the horizon. In the winter months, the pale glow of Oslo is visible in the night sky like a static aurora, but otherwise the capital might as well be on another planet. The main town in the area is Hønefoss, which is a twenty-minute drive away north along the E16 road.

Utøya is big enough to accommodate caves, beaches, fields and woodland but small enough for a child to be able to cross the island in a couple of minutes, from the rushes in the small bay on the eastern side to the cliffs on the western side, or from Nakenodden [Naked Point] at the southern tip to Stoltenberget in the north, a rock named after Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his father Thorvald, himself a former Labour minister. Couples could easily disappear in the thickets or hide in the caves on the western side.

From the air, the island looks flat, inviting and heart-shaped, but, for boats coming from the west, the island is steep and unapproachable. The sediments in the rock faces resemble wooden growth rings or pages of a thick book. Utøya is a land in its own right. Independent, self-sufficient and isolated from the world, like a miniature Norway, or every child's dream of a secret paradise without adults, a land they can discover, build and govern all by themselves.

On the morning of 22 July 2011, Anzor Djoukaev was woken by the sound of rain falling on his tent canvas. He was at the Hedmark county branch's camp, at the end of the campsite in the field. His sleeping bag was wet. He edged his way towards the tent opening and glanced out at the greyness. His shaved head made the raptor-like features of his face stand out. A Caucasian eagle on a Norwegian islet. There were many routes to Utøya. Anzor was seventeen years old, and it was his third time at the summer camp run by the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking [the Workers’ Youth League; AUF]. The weather did not look very promising, but he knew from experience that it could change quickly. The football tournament was due to start at half past eight, but Anzor decided to skip it. Water dripped off a pair of socks left on the guy-ropes. It was simply too wet. He sighed, crawled carefully back onto his ground mat, adjusted his sleeping bag so that he came into contact with the wet parts as little as possible and lay down to sleep again.

Around Anzor, the other boys were snoring. Once again, they had gone to bed in the early hours of the morning, after another sleepless summer night. Not much sleep, too many friends and too many girls. Luckily they could sleep during the lectures. Around the Hedmark camp, dozens of colourful tents shone in the grey morning light. Hundreds of teenagers were waking up to a new day, and the early birds were already shuffling off in their Crocs to the showers and the toilets in the wash house, with their toothbrushes and sponge bags in their hands and their rain jackets slung over their shoulders. The wash house was built on piles raised slightly above the ground and was supplied with water from the pump house down by the water's edge a hundred metres away.

About a thousand young people from across the country were visiting the camp during the week, which meant a lot of showers and many thousands of litres of water each day. There were many routes to Utøya. Anzor had arrived on Tuesday evening, more or less straight from Chechnya. Utøya was the highlight of the summer. He thought everyone was nice there. There was no backstabbing, conflict or bullying.

The idea that landscape forms character is a central tenet of the Norwegian mentality, and this notion is still in the best of health, possibly because it cannot be disproved, even in an age when many Norwegians spend more time in virtual landscapes on screens than in forest, field and fell. In any case, there was no doubt that Utøya had set its mark on the AUF, making the group one of the most robust creatures among the fauna of Norwegian politics. The AUF is older than the state of Norway. One of the organization's precursors, Norges Socialdemokratiske Ungdomsforbund [the Norwegian Social-Democratic Youth League], was founded in 1903, two years before Norway became an independent state. The AUF celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as early as 1950, since the Oslo local branch had been founded in 1900. Its fiftieth birthday present from Oslo og Akershus faglige samorganisasjon [the Oslo and Akershus Trade Union Confederation] was neither flowers nor a case of wine. It was an island: Utøya.

To be gifted paradise seems like fantasy, a dream present – until you think about the maintenance costs. It took time to work Utøya into the organization and into its budget. The committee report from 1958–60 stated that Utøya represented a ‘disproportionately large burden on the organization's labour capacity and finances’. Pictures hang in the corridor in the island's Café Building of voluntary work from the early sixties, with pale and muscular young men bent over their spades. At the same time, Norway was changing. In 1960, half of Norwegian voters were workers. Fifty years later, the traditional workers made up only 18 per cent. While 3 per cent had received higher education back then, the figure has now risen ninefold, to 28 per cent. The number of public-sector employees had more than tripled from 200,000 to 730,000 people. Whether or not it was owing to muscles shrinking proportionately as a result of the revolution in education, AUF members nevertheless began to tire of intensive collective work on the green island.

In the late sixties, the situation had become so desperate that the AUF tried to sell off Utøya. The summer camp in July had been the main event on the island right from the start, but it took many decades before it was established as one of the core events in the social-democratic calendar and the crowning argument in AUF recruiters’ persuasion of new generations of youth members: ‘And then we've also got a summer camp with football, swimming, concerts and hundreds of cool people – on an island!’ But the Trade Union Confederation turned out to have been far-sighted. The combination of politically engaged youth and a fairy-tale-like summer island generated a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Utøya would become the place where the politics of the future were hammered together at political workshops, but, more than that, it was perhaps where Norway's governing caste was formed. The Labour Party has been the dominant political force in Norway since the Second World War. Support for the AUF's policies from its mother party has not always been great, but Utøya became the place where many future social democrats spent their first time away from their mums and dads, the place where they had their first kiss and met their future friends – and sometimes husbands and wives. The loyalty and discipline that characterize the Norwegian Labour Party and distinguish it from the fragmented organization, frequent defections and bitter leadership battles of its main competitor, the Norwegian Conservative Party, were formed on Utøya. In Norway, where the number of registered members of organizations is approximately six times the population, it goes without saying that the strongest organization will dominate the field.

Utøya at Its Best

The political and the personal were poured into the Utøya mould in equal measure, beaten out through discussions, warmed by the summer sun and bathed in the Tyrifjord at night. Not everyone on the island would become prime minister, but all Labour Party prime ministers since Gro Harlem Brundtland had learnt the ropes on Utøya. ‘The paradise of my youth’ is what the current prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, called Utøya. The highlight that Friday was to be the visit by Gro herself, known as the ‘Mother of the Nation’, who led the Labour Party from 1981 to 1992 and for Norway personified ‘the Marxist utopia consisting of “true equality between the sexes” ’,¹ as Anders Behring Breivik later expressed it.

It was the first time in ten years that Gro had come to Utøya, and the older AUF members wondered whether the younger ones on the island would come to hear her talk. In one of the bedrooms in the wash house, Ida Spjelkavik planned her day as she put on her trainers and got ready for that morning's volleyball game. Ida, twenty-five years old and from Trondheim, was the AUF's international secretary. Perhaps as a consequence of her background as a presenter on student radio (where she hosted a foreign affairs programme) and on NRK, Ida had a calm and natural air of authority that put those around her at ease. As steady as a rock, I thought when I first met her in 2010, but as accommodating as a summer's day. Her bright eyes, round face, blonde hair and cheerful laugh made her a natural focal point for the international volleyball team, which included visitors from Uganda, Georgia, Swaziland and Lebanon.

There were many routes to Utøya. The international visitors were interested in Gro, who was a high-profile international leader, but would the fourteen-year-old Norwegians remember who she was? Ida was not sure. And how would the workshop on Western Sahara go later on in the day? It was conceivable that not all of the island's guests were as passionate about international solidarity as Ida was.

Utøya had been at its best the day before, Ida thought a little bitterly, as she struggled in the mud on the volleyball court a few minutes later. The rain was lashing down and the clouds hung over the treetops like a jagged and cracked row of teeth. There was no Utøya without mud, but on the volleyball court it seemed as if the mud rose up from below the surface of the earth like cold lava, swallowing grass and trainers alike. The international team was making little progress against the Norwegians that day, Ida realized, as the ball smashed down at the international team's feet, sending the rainwater splattering.

The previous day there had been a debate about the Middle East with Jonas Gahr Støre, the lean foreign minister who was idolized by parts of the AUF. The Middle East was the main international issue for the AUF members, who took the opportunity to challenge the foreign minister. Why not boycott Israel? Why could Norway not recognize Palestine straight away, with the governing authorities asking for recognition and all countries in favour of the two-state solution?

‘I don't believe in boycotts,’ Støre answered, explaining to the youngsters sitting on the grass why he saw isolation as both the wrong strategy and an ineffective one. ‘People have to talk to each other’, he concluded, ‘even if they disagree – and especially when they disagree.’

A heavy-set girl in her mid-twenties looked around to see what the young people thought about the boycott question. In the Storting, Stine Renate Håheim represented not only Oppland county but, in practice, the AUF members too. She was the youngest member of the Storting's Standing Committee on Justice but a grand old lady on Utøya. The island had left its mark on her in the sense that the football tournaments had wrecked her knees. Stine compensated with her inspired leadership of the cheering section.

Earlier that summer, Stine had joined Freedom Flotilla II in Athens, with its shiploads of activists planning to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The project was not without its risks: nine activists had been killed when the Israelis boarded their ships the year before. Palestine was the international issue that Håheim was most passionate about: occupying another country was not right, shooting at civilians in Gaza City was not right, nor was the blockade of the Palestinian ports. It was the fight for justice that led her to join the AUF as a fifteen-year-old. Every time something has been changed in Norway, she thought, the Labour Party has had a role to play. Håheim was an eloquent person who had found her calling at Utøya, just like Anzor and Ida. Her burning engagement could shine brightly there.

The Freedom Flotilla had received considerable attention from the media, and that was something, but the expedition itself was a fiasco. Due to a sawn-off propeller shaft and strange decisions by the Greek port authorities, the boats never left Piraeus that summer, so Håheim was spared the ordeal of encountering the Israeli special forces at sea. Instead, Comrade Håheim (as she called herself on her blog) sat on the grass on Utøya, attentively following Støre's analysis of the Netanyahu government's likely reaction to the application for UN membership being prepared in Ramallah by the Palestinians. Håheim had a pinch of snus under her lip, the kind of tobacco snuff popular in Norway.

Further up the grassy slope, Anzor dozed in the sunshine. His thoughts circled off high up into the sky, but the lad from Lillestrøm nodded in agreement when he thought he heard Støre support a boycott of Israel. Attitudes, expectations and bias affect your understanding, and Anzor misunderstood the foreign minister on this point – otherwise the 2011 summer camp would have made even bigger headlines than usual that evening.

It was part of the nature of the AUF to criticize its mother party. From the very start, the militantly anti-militarist youth had admonished the Labour Party for lacking revolutionary vigour and pandering to the parliamentary system. The conflict peaked in the early twenties. Should the Labour Party remain a member of the Soviet-led Comintern and choose to follow a revolutionary line, or should it participate in the democratic institutions of non-socialist Norway? The AUF members saw themselves as the spearhead of revolution, genuine communists, and they were activists by nature. One of their leaders, Einar Gerhardsen, who would later become prime minister, turned up outside the premises of Aftenposten in Akersgata and threatened the editors with dynamite. He was prosecuted and convicted for his conduct.

In November 1923, the youth organization broke away from its mother party and endorsed the Moscow-loyal Communist Party of Norway, which was formed by dissenters from the Labour Party. Among the minority who stayed to create a new organization, named the Left Communist Youth League, was Einar Gerhardsen from Oslo. But, while the communists would be a footnote in Norwegian history, the split heralded a century of social-democratic hegemony: the century of the Labour Party. The war changed the Labour Party's stance on defence and alliance politics, but the AUF remained a left-wing ideological stone in the shoe of the pragmatic governing Labour Party.

During the so-called Easter Rebellion of 1958, when the AUF branch known as the Sosialistisk Studentlag [Socialist Student Group] proposed a resolution criticizing NATO and the deployment of nuclear weapons in West Germany, another group of AUF members disappeared off to the left. In protest against Norway's membership of NATO, the excluded AUF members and their sympathizers established the Socialist People's Party. Traditionally, the AUF's anti-militarism resulted from the perception of the army as a tool of the upper class. Although the war changed the relationship between the army and the Labour Party, a latent scepticism remained in the AUF towards the use of force and the alliance with the USA. The mother party's attitude towards the AUF resembled that of a proud but slightly patronizing parent who thinks that her children's piercings are a bit ridiculous, that their opinions are sweet, but that her offspring will turn out well in the end. We all grow up eventually, after all.

‘The youth organization is much more capable than the Party and the trade union movement when it comes to schooling socialist-minded and socialist-inclined women and men,’ the late Haakon Lie once said. Lie would go on to become an influential secretary of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1969.

Forty years later, he dismissed the AUF as ‘half-educated scamps’ when they interfered in the debate about the EEC referendum in 1972. Utøya nurtured utopian socialists rather than pragmatic social democrats. The attitude towards the AUF as an optimal cadre factory but a political lightweight was most clearly expressed by Haakon Lie, but he was probably not the only one with that view in the Labour Party.

‘We Must Be Vigilant Now’

After the Middle East debate was over, Ida had led the workshop about the world's newest state, which was introduced by Liv Tørress from Norwegian People's Aid. The sun was still shining on the grass and on Spjelkavik's ‘global group’. Tørress's stories from the war in the country now known as South Sudan, and her thoughts about future developments, attracted a large audience. To top it all, Jonas Gahr Støre came and perched on one of the logs at the Oslo branch's camp, where the international guests had gathered in the afternoon. Støre had asked Natia how things were in Georgia and had asked Sam about the situation in Uganda, but Ida thought that what made the greatest impression on the international guests was not Støre's wealth of knowledge, but the simple fact that a foreign minister in trainers was speaking to them on equal terms, quite informally and without any bodyguards or advisers.

Ida Spjelkavik and ‘the global group’ with Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre on Utøya, 21 July 2011; from left to right: Ritah from Uganda, Tamta from Georgia, Thabile from Swaziland, Natia from Georgia, Jonas Gahr Støre, Bassel from Lebanon, Sam from Uganda, and Ida Spjelkavik (photograph by Tore S. Bekkedal)

In the background, the team from Norwegian People's Aid shuffled about. The organization did not only contribute experts from its comprehensive international humanitarian work for the international workshops. The team from Hadeland in south-eastern Norway also comforted the young ones who missed their parents, put plasters on those who grazed themselves on the rocks and brought ice packs to those who got injured on the football pitch. While other state-supporting parties had militia or paramilitary wings, the Norwegian Labour Party had its own humanitarian organization. Norway in a nutshell, Ida thought, this odd country out, on the very edge of the world map.

Norwegian People's Aid also had its roots in an age with more conflict. The organization's baptism of fire was in Finland during the Winter War of 1939–40, but in the summer of 2011 the wars were further away, in Afghanistan and Libya. On Thursday 21 July, Norwegian People's Aid had national representatives from Palestine and South Sudan. They were there to give substance to the notion of international solidarity.

The summer camp on Utøya is situated not only in the middle of the Tyrifjord but also in the middle of the slow news season. An appearance there almost guaranteed space on the evening news, and there was an election looming in September. In that respect, there was a certain logic in the Labour Party leaders dividing the days between them, interrupting their holidays to pop in and see the AUF. But Utøya was also one of the places where Støre could bring himself up to speed with political activists. As the foreign minister drove back to his holiday cabin in Tvedestrand that afternoon, he sorted his impressions in his head. So many different faces. All those young people would build a common future for themselves and for the country. Who would these young people become, and what would they do when it was their turn?

One of the exciting things about the AUF was that the participants on Utøya not only represented the whole country but increasingly came from all over the world. In the football match, he had played on a team with a girl from Somalia. She had hurt her foot, and, even though she had been bandaged up by the people from Norwegian People's Aid, she was still limping afterwards.

Støre got home in time to join his family for dinner with some friends. The evening sun was warm and languid. It was completely calm. On the way home to their summer cabin, Støre and his family steered their boat out onto the clear waters of the fjord. An enormous sunset blazed away on their right. One member of the family shook her head and muttered that the blood-red sky did not bode well. ‘Red sky at night … ,’ thought Støre.

That same day, an article by Støre was published in Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad under the title ‘Urolige tider’ [Uneasy times], in which he wrote: ‘When I read about great historical events, I often ponder what the people of the age were thinking immediately before history took an unexpected turn. In the early summer of 1914, leading politicians said that there were no clouds in the sky of high politics. A few weeks later, the First World War was under way.’²

Støre's uneasiness was linked to what the long-term political consequences might be of the crises in the eurozone and in US government spending. He envisaged a growing anger, the final form of which nobody could foresee, and he called for alertness:

I fear the social unrest that will come when new generations cannot get jobs […] and ordinary families have to face the bill for financial and political indulgences for which they never voted. [… L]arge parts of Europe and the USA will see this as deeply unfair. And they will seek out ways to express their anger.

We do not know today what such frustration will lead to, but the result of what we are seeing over the course of this summer makes me uneasy. I am glad that the Norwegian economy is in order, but we must be vigilant now.³

Over his years as foreign minister, Støre had led Norwegian efforts in Afghanistan and defended Norway's military involvement in the war in Libya. As an adviser for Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundt­land in the nineties, he had built up an international section in the Office of the Prime Minister. He had later followed Gro to Geneva as her chief of staff when she led the World Health Organization. Støre had seen how the world had shrunk after the end of the Cold War. Internal affairs could become foreign affairs over the course of a couple of messages on Twitter or a blog post. Caricatures from a Danish newspaper went around the world, causing a commotion from Chad to Chechnya, due to the efforts of some enterprising activists and smart politicians flirting with fear and conflict. Foreign policy hit home in the form of sanctions against Norwegian business, coffins from Afghanistan or a Norwegian population with roots in other parts of the world. If there was flooding in Sri Lanka, the waves reached all the way to Oslo and Stavanger.

There were two ways to see this development, either as a threat to the traditional Norway or as an inevitable development that enriched Norway, if it was handled properly. Støre stressed the latter view. In domestic politics, Støre had promoted integration as a major issue and launched the concept of ‘the new Norwegian we’ to create a more inclusive Norwegian identity that was not focused exclusively on ethnicity, names and skin colour, and which accepted that people did not need to be only one thing. They could be Norwegian but also Sikh or Muslim, Norwegian but also Polish or Chilean.

While Støre had been Norway's most popular politician since 2005, he was at the same time the most hated among opponents of immigration and extreme critics of Islam. ‘The most dangerous man in Norway,’ according to Anders Behring Breivik. ‘Must we now follow Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre's order to the Norwegian people to “adapt” to the New Norway and the Greater We?’ asked a leaflet from the organization Stopp islamiseringen av Norge [Stop the Islamization of Norway]. ‘Is that what you want? Have you been asked?’

It was not just those sceptical towards immigration or critical of Islam who disliked what Støre stood for. At half past six in the evening on 14 January 2008, Støre was in Kabul. During a meeting with the leader of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, he heard a bang outside the hotel. The explosion was followed by salvos of shots and further explosions. The security guards in the room ordered everyone down onto the floor, including Støre. The guards drew their weapons and moved into position by the doors. In the lobby, which was on the floor above the meeting room, a man in a police uniform stormed in through the entrance door armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Another terrorist was left lying in the courtyard outside, killed in the exchange of fire with the hotel guards. A third died in the lobby when he set off the bomb in his vest. The terrorist shot at everything that moved. A Norwegian photographer came out of the lift and saw a policeman point a weapon at him. The photographer threw himself to the ground and avoided the shots. Two other Norwegians in the lobby were hit, Bjørn Svennungsen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Carsten Thomassen, a journalist from Dagbladet. Thomassen later died of his injuries. An American diplomat was also killed, together with three of the hotel staff. While the attacker searched for more victims in the gym on the ground floor, Støre was evacuated to a bomb shelter at the bottom of the hotel complex. A few minutes later, the attack was over and the four terrorists were either killed or taken prisoner. It was never clarified whether Støre was the target of the Taliban's attack. He travelled home uninjured, but with the experience of having seen fanaticism at close quarters.

The AUF summer camp was a polar opposite to the hatred shown at the Serena Hotel. Together with the typically Norwegian faces of AUF members such as Ida Spjelkavik and Stine Håheim was not only the eagle-like face of Anzor from the Caucasus but also an abundance of faces with Arab, Tamil, Persian, Latin, Albanian, African, South-East Asian and Polynesian features. On the surface it looked as if Støre's ‘new Norwegian we’ was taking shape. The question was perhaps whether there was a deeper reality behind it, or whether Utøya was a kind of saccharine, state-subsidized utopia in the Tyrifjord that would fall apart the day it became real.

Ida and Stine had been going to Utøya for more than a decade and knew that determined long-term work led to results. They did not feel part of an abstract new Norwegian we, made up in a column in Aftenposten. On Utøya it was just ‘we’. Back in the nineties, the AUF defined its aim of becoming the most inclusive, multicultural organization in Norway. That entailed positive discrimination in favour of minorities when it came to choosing positions and duties in the organization. Since Utøya was the way into the AUF, a low-threshold event, everything was arranged to facilitate the participation of young people from minority backgrounds. Pork was not served at the summer camp, so everyone would eat the same food (unless they were vegetarians). An alcohol ban was already in place, and the shower rules were changed to make it clear which facilities and times were for the girls and which were for the boys. The AUF actively recruited in places with many immigrants, and some of the Utøya participants still lived in reception centres for asylum seekers. The children of first-generation immigrants were beginning to take part, and some of them were leader types who brought others in with them. After Mani Hosseini got involved in the AUF, there was a wave of new Kurdish members in Akershus county. Similar things happened elsewhere.

Through its hard work, and by building on the internationalist foundation of the labour movement itself, Marx and Engels’ slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, the AUF was reforging the Norwegian labour movement. Utøya's rainbow race might have looked artificially perfect, but it also communicated that the labour movement was drawing energy from the growing pains Norway was going through in connection with immigration and integration. Many of the second-generation immigrants on Utøya had experienced discrimination, poverty and conflict and had a more concrete relationship to the values of the labour movement than many of the typically Norwegian children of the welfare state.

Stop Them with Spirit

Utøya is about fixing things that are falling apart, that suddenly go wrong, stop working or simply do not turn up. There are holes in the tents that must be mended, cold water in the showers and rice that must be cooked if the potatoes are finished. Utøya is about always being prepared. Utøya is about improvising. In that respect, Utøya is not only a paradise or every utopian young socialist's wet dream, but also training in the ideas that characterize the mother party: problem solving, the will to govern and pragmatism.

The memories had begun to fade of the time when the AUF was an action group, with members who had travelled round the countryside in the thirties to beat up the paramilitaries of Nasjonal Samling [National Unity], the fascist party founded by Vidkun Quisling, and who had participated in all sections of the resistance movement during the war. Sixty-five years of peace and prosperity had made both Norwegians and AUF members into people with ‘many friends in common, and no enemies’,⁴ as the author Erlend Loe put it.

In spite of the tough leadership struggle in the autumn of 2010, when Eskil Pedersen beat Åsmund Aukrust in the ballot, with 175 against 173 votes, it was a harmonious and calm group of two young women and two young men who led the AUF. It might almost seem that Utøya was too good to be true.

Drinking?

‘No, practically none at all,’ said Anne-Berit Stavenes, the leader of the Norwegian People's Aid team on Utøya.

Fighting?

‘No, not here. Utøya is a paradise. The week we spend on the island is a holiday for us too.’

At about ten o’clock in the morning on 22 July 2011, the AUF published a report on its website about the new memorial at Utøya. Ida and Eskil Pedersen had taken part in the unveiling two days earlier. A modest plaque had been screwed into the trunk of a birch tree straight across from the kiosk at the Café Building. The text was almost invisible when the sun shone on the bright metal, but in the rain and mist on Friday 22 July the letters stood out like dark cracks on the smooth façade. The sparse text honoured the memory of ‘the AUF members who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9’, listing the names of four young men from Lørenskog, Trondheim, Førde and Kabelvåg who were killed in Spain in 1937 and 1938.

Martin Schei, from Førde in western Norway, was only eighteen years old when he left an AUF course on Utøya and – without saying goodbye to his parents or family, and contrary to the mother party's line of neutrality – set off for the recruitment office in Paris. In Spain, he joined the Spanish government forces in the fight against Franco's rebel army. He fell a few months later in September 1937, during the Aragon Offensive. Schei reached the age of nineteen. Beneath the names of the fallen are some lines from Nordahl Grieg's 1936 poem ‘Til ungdommen’ [literally, ‘To the youth’]: ‘The grenades roll silently / on conveyor belts. / Stop their drift towards death, / stop them with spirit!’⁵

From land, Utøya has many faces, depending on the season, the weather and from where it is observed. Sometimes the island looms in the rain like a dark secret on the leaden grey waters of the fjord. At other times, it can only vaguely be seen as a mirage in the mist, a glimpse of something dark revealing itself and disappearing so quickly that from land you are left wondering if you really did see something out there.

For most people, the island was just a fleeting flash of green down in the massive Tyrifjord, which thousands of commuters drove past on weekdays and tens of thousands of tourists from Oslo went past at weekends on their way up to their cabins in the mountains. During the daytime, the rushing sound of the E16 road could be heard out across the fjord, but, at night-time, all that could be heard on Utøya was the lapping of the waves and the wind in the trees. Except when the summer camp was on.

The quiet guests at the campsite on the other side of the water from Utøya did not associate the AUF with calm and objective political discussion but with a smörgåsbord of noise: cheering from the football pitch, roaring music from the stage and the rock tent, often through the night, screaming and yelling from the teenagers in the water. The noise died down in the wee hours of the morning and was a little less loud when it rained, but otherwise the young ones kept going throughout that whole week in July.

Notes

All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.

1 2083, p. 854.

2 Jonas Gahr Støre, ‘Urolige tider’ [Uneasy times], Bergens Tidende, 21 July 2011, www.bt.no/meninger/kommentar/Urolige-tider-2540395.html.

3 Ibid.

4 Erlend Loe, L (Oslo: Cappelen, 1999), p. 23.

5 Nordahl Grieg, ‘Til ungdommen’ [To the youth], in Samlede dikt (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2011), pp. 138–9.