Death shall not prevail
Robert Powell reveals the background to a song close to the hearts of the Norwegian people
On 22 July, exactly three months ago, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two year old Norwegian, set off a car bomb outside government buildings in Oslo. It killed eight of his fellow countrymen. An hour and a half later, dressed as a policeman, he landed on the small island of Utøya where the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League was holding a summer camp. There he shot and killed sixty-nine more people. His victims included fifty-five teenagers.
A few days later, one of the journalists outside the courthouse in Oslo is reported to have told Breivik’s lawyer to ‘tell (his) client to burn in hell.’ However, the reaction of thousands of other Norwegians, especially young ones, was altogether more interesting and typically Scandinavian. They came out onto the streets and sang.
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