Struer

Struer is a place in Jutland associated with a pig farm whose past connects the records surrounding Viggo Dürer with Victoria Bergman’s recollections of abuse. The farm’s pig shed becomes a setting she and Charlotte Silfverberg agree to revisit in conversation, where the ordinary language of holiday memories is set against violence and the evidence preserved in Polaroids.

Location and documentary record

A Danish tax-office account states that Viggo Dürer declared income from pig farming for a long period, although the business appears to have fared poorly: in some years, he had no recorded income. The farm was in Jutland, at a place called Struer, and had been sold ten years before the account was given. The record anchors Struer to Dürer’s past without establishing more about the farm’s operation or ownership than the account provides.

The farm and Victoria’s recollections

Victoria Bergman’s planned meeting with Charlotte Silfverberg is explicitly to discuss the pig farm outside Struer and what happened there. They intend to speak about the events in its pig shed, including boys drugged and forced to fight, men sexually abusing young girls, and women who called themselves mothers watching excitedly. The place is therefore not merely the subject of an old financial record: it is the setting of remembered violence that Victoria is preparing to name aloud.

Evidence and narrative significance

Victoria plans to illustrate her account with Polaroid pictures revealing what her foster parents had done. The photographs make the past material and visible as she prepares to discuss it with Charlotte, the woman who once called herself her mother. The contrast between the farm’s plain description as a place of pig farming and the acts recalled there gives Struer its narrative weight: it is both a location that can be traced in records and a site of experiences that Victoria and Charlotte must confront together.