Second World War

The Second World War appears in the book less as a sequence of battles than as a past repeatedly recruited to shape identity. In Varg Vikernes’s account, childhood play with German toy soldiers develops into an attraction to German military equipment and imagery. The book sets that personal recollection against the postwar taboo surrounding things German in Norway, where American culture was widely available, and shows how a remembered war could become material for defiance rather than simply a settled national history.

Childhood Memory and German Soldiers

Vikernes traces his interest in wartime Germany to early childhood. After his family moved to a road named Odinsvei, he played with a neighbor who owned German toy soldiers but preferred the American ones. The younger Vikernes ended up with the German figures and says that he came to like them. In his telling, the toys mark the beginning of an interest that later expanded beyond play.

He recalls moving from toy soldiers to running around with SS helmets, German hand grenades, and a Schmeizer bearing a swastika. The childhood account gives the interest a material dimension: its focus is not only on historical allegiances but on objects, uniforms, and weapons. Vikernes says he and his peers later tried to work out what the imagery meant, presenting his fascination as something that developed over time rather than appearing suddenly.

Postwar Taboo and Counter-Identification

The book places that development within a Norwegian cultural setting shaped by the war’s aftermath. Vikernes describes everything German as taboo after the Second World War and says Norwegian children were consequently exposed to a great deal of American culture. He presents his own response as hostility toward that culture, a counter-identification formed in part through the contrast between the Germans in war comics and the Americans and British who defeated them.

His account emphasizes the visual and material qualities he admired: German weapons seemed better to him, and German soldiers appeared disciplined and Viking-like. He also recalls resenting comic-book scenes in which a British soldier could defeat a whole platoon of Germans, which he regarded as false. These are Vikernes’s retrospective explanations, not an independent account of the war or a verification of his childhood memories. Their importance in the book lies in showing how he recast wartime images as symbols of strength and opposition.

A Changing Sequence of Identities

Vikernes links his early interest in German wartime culture to a longer sequence of shifting affiliations. He says he was a skinhead at fifteen or sixteen, before the public image of him as someone who had suddenly become a Nazi. He characterizes his interests as arriving in waves: occultism in 1991, Satanism in 1992, and mythology in 1993. The sequence does not make those interests equivalent, but it places his wartime fascination within a changing process of self-fashioning rather than presenting it as a single, complete political identity formed in childhood.

The recollection also reveals how concrete emblems could carry several meanings at once. Helmets, weapons, and the swastika belonged to an identifiable historical repertoire, but Vikernes describes his attraction through their appearance, power, and contrast with the American culture around him. The book records that attraction without treating the speaker’s judgments about military superiority or historical representation as established fact.

Memory Beside the International Black Metal Story

The book’s wider account moves from Vikernes’s personal past to the international spread of Black Metal, while keeping those scales distinct. It describes the Norwegian scene as receiving extensive attention in overseas media and as one example that influenced developments elsewhere. In Sweden, the book reports that an attempted arson against Christopher Jonsson’s house was directed by Vikernes in July 1992; in the United Kingdom, some fans carried out church attacks in emulation of him. These episodes establish his later symbolic reach, but the text does not identify them as consequences of the Second World War or of his childhood memories of German soldiers.

Other comparisons point to local conditions rather than a single historical cause. The book discusses heavy metal’s forbidden appeal in former communist countries, including East Germany, and notes the emergence of Black Metal scenes in places such as Finland. These contexts widen the account beyond Norway, but they do not collapse postwar German memory, communist-era opposition, and Black Metal into one phenomenon. The Second World War’s clearest role here remains narrower and more personal: it is a remembered cultural landscape through which Vikernes explains an early attraction and a later posture of resistance.