Norwegian Tragedy
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On 22 July 2011 a young man named Anders Behring Breivik carried out one of the most vicious terrorist acts in post-war Europe. In a carefully orchestrated sequence of actions he bombed government buildings in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths, then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya, where he murdered sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers.
How could Anders Behring Breivik - a middle-class boy from the West End of Oslo - end up as one of the most violent terrorists in post-war Europe? Where did his hatred come from?
In A Norwegian Tragedy, Aage Borchgrevink attempts to provide an answer. Taking us with him to the multiethnic and class-divided city where Breivik grew up, he follows the perpetrator of the attacks into an unfamiliar online world of violent computer games and anti-Islamic hatred, and demonstrates the connection between Breivik’s childhood and the darkest pages of his 1500-page manifesto.
This is the definitive story of 22 July 2011: a Norwegian tragedy.
How could Anders Behring Breivik - a middle-class boy from the West End of Oslo - end up as one of the most violent terrorists in post-war Europe? Where did his hatred come from?
In A Norwegian Tragedy, Aage Borchgrevink attempts to provide an answer. Taking us with him to the multiethnic and class-divided city where Breivik grew up, he follows the perpetrator of the attacks into an unfamiliar online world of violent computer games and anti-Islamic hatred, and demonstrates the connection between Breivik’s childhood and the darkest pages of his 1500-page manifesto.
This is the definitive story of 22 July 2011: a Norwegian tragedy.
Aage Borchgrevink is an eminent Norwegian journalist and literary critic. He has worked as an advisor to the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights since 1993 and in 2004 was awarded the Ossietzky Award by the Norwegian P.E.N. Club for outstanding promotion of free speech.