Davit Beglaryan
Long before Blixa Bargeld sang of an “enclave of the heart” called Nagorny Karabach (Artsakh), Armenia had already occupied a distinct place in the work of Einstürzende Neubauten.
That connection began in the early 1980s.
Bargeld has recalled listening to and recording a radio program devoted to Armenian music around 1981. The experience stayed with him and eventually found its way into “Armenia,” released by Einstürzende Neubauten in 1983.
It was not an isolated reference.
By the time “Nagorny Karabach” appeared on Alles wieder offen in 2007, Armenia was therefore not some distant or accidental reference in Bargeld’s artistic world.
It had been there for more than two decades.
Still, “Nagorny Karabach” was different.
Bargeld made clear that the song was not intended as a literal description of Artsakh. He had never visited it. He described it instead as the “Nagorny Karabach of my mind,” an imagined enclave and refuge, a place of separation from the world around him.
In the song, Nagorny Karabach (Artsakh) becomes almost dreamlike.
There are mountains, valleys, trees, birds and mist. The place is distant from the noise below. It is secluded, intimate and protective.
An enclave of the heart.
For Armenians, however, Artsakh was never merely a metaphor.
It was home.
Its mountains were covered with Armenian villages, churches, monasteries and cemeteries. Generations were born there, lived there and were buried there. Its geography was inseparable from Armenian memory and identity.
That is what makes the song so difficult to hear in the aftermath of 2023.
Beginning in December 2022, Artsakh was progressively cut off from Armenia through the blockade of the Lachin (Berdzor) Corridor. Food, medicine and fuel became scarce. In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military aggression against Artsakh.
Within days, more than 100,000 Armenians fled.
Virtually the entire Armenian population of Artsakh was displaced.
And suddenly Bargeld’s “enclave of the heart” acquired a meaning he could never have intended when the song was released sixteen years earlier.
The mountains remained.
The monasteries remained.
The villages remained.
The houses remained.
But the people were gone.
That is the haunting contradiction at the center of the song today.
Bargeld could imagine Nagorny Karabach as a refuge.
The Armenians of Artsakh lost the ability to return to the real one.
This does not mean the song should be retroactively transformed into a political anthem. Bargeld was clear about what he intended, and that distinction should be respected.
But artists do not control what history eventually does to their work.
A song changes when the world around it changes.
A title carries different weight after a homeland has been emptied.
And “Nagorny Karabach” can no longer be heard in quite the same way after 2023.
There is also something remarkable in the continuity of Bargeld’s engagement with Armenian subjects.
He listened to Armenian music before the Soviet Union collapsed. He turned that encounter into “Armenia.” He later returned to the duduk. He addressed the mass killing of Armenians within a work about the First World War. Then, in 2007, he gave one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s most haunting songs the name Nagorny Karabach.
Decades later, that name carries an even heavier meaning.
For Bargeld, Nagorny Karabach was an imagined refuge.
For Armenians, Artsakh was a homeland.
One survived in a song.
The other was emptied of its people.
