San Fransisco Existed In Nagorno-Karabakh

Blankspot, Sweden
For the German musician Blixa Bargeld, Nagorno-Karabakh was a metaphor for the uniqueness of San Francisco. In this week’s column, Rasmus Canbäck writes about what the song “Nagorny Karabach” has meant to him.
Av RASMUS CANBÄCK
This could have been my first concert review. But after some thought, there’s something entirely different I want to write about, which requires us to rewind a couple of years.
It’s March 2021, and I’ve just passed the Russian military checkpoint at the bottom of the notorious Lachin Corridor. Ahead of me are the high, dark mountains, where the clouds hang thickly.
My Armenian fixer and I sit in silence as we drive into Nagorno-Karabakh. We are still tense after being let through. No other foreign journalist has made it for weeks, maybe even months.
After rounding a corner and with the Russians out of sight, I stop the white four-wheel-drive vehicle. There’s just something I have to do, I tell the fixer, and I play a song.
”The city lies under fog. I stand atop my mountain, in my black garden. I’m squeezed between the heavens, in the the enclave of my choice, where I hide myself. In Nagorny Karabakh*.”
The voice of the German singer Blixa Bargeld comes from the car’s speakers.
It would turn out to be the last time I listened to Nagorny Karabach by Einstürzende Neubauten while driving into the region that shares its name with the song. With that, I became the last foreign journalist to enter the enclave from the Armenian side.
Later, Blixa Bargeld explained that he used Nagorny Karabach as a metaphor for San Francisco, or really as a metaphor for a place that exists in its own world. The inspiration came from the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński, who in his depictions of travels in the Soviet Union, had found himself in Nagorno-Karabakh.
As a teenager, Kapuściński’s depictions, poetically retold through Bargeld’s lyrics, captivated me. The Armenian highlands meeting the Azerbaijani lowlands in Nagorno-Karabakh seemed utterly mesmerizing.
When I first traveled there in 2016, after a trip to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, the war had just returned. The perhaps childish and somewhat colonial view I had of Nagorno-Karabakh was met by a different reality.
But Bargeld’s metaphor remained.
Nagorno-Karabakh was not like other places I had visited. Over time, I’ve come to understand that there are many places to which the metaphor applies—places where external circumstances have created a unique culture found nowhere else.
The Russian-speaking city of Narva in eastern Estonia is one such place. The city neither wants to see itself as part of Putin’s Russia nor as part of the country’s Estonian-speaking majority. Budapest’s hipster districts, as Orbán’s government has attacked democracy, have become another. The Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, and perhaps all of Swedish Finland, form a third. Jokkmokk, as a Sami cultural center in Sweden, a fourth. Some have even been listed as World Heritage sites, such as Berlin’s techno scene.
Like Nagorno-Karabakh—until it was emptied of its Armenian population in September last year—these places are united by a special survival instinct. It manifests itself in a vibrant local civil society, cultural expressions, and strong local media. This, in turn, fosters innovation and entrepreneurship.
The metaphor that Bargeld sings about in Nagorny Karabach can be seen as a tribute to these unique places.
On October 11 and 12, Einstürzende Neubauten came to Sweden to perform at Fållan in Stockholm. I managed to get a ticket to the extra concert on Friday and immediately emailed the band. I told them about how the song had inspired me to travel to Nagorno-Karabakh.
However, just hours before the concert, I was disappointed to realize that the song hadn’t been played earlier on the tour, and that disappointment lingered until the encores, when Blixa Bargeld finally spoke.
”This song is about a place that no longer exists. Actually, it’s really about San Francisco, which no longer exists either,” he said.
Perhaps it’s only memories of the mountains squeezed between the skies, the black garden, that remain.
*German spelling of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Top image: Karabakh means ”the black garden” in several local languages. Photo montage by Rasmus Canbäck, with Blixa Bargeld in the center.