"Set them free at the break of dawn."
While at a concert, Carlo Karges, the guitar player of Nena's band, noticed that balloons were being released. As he watched them move toward the horizon, he noticed them shifting and changing shapes, where they looked nothing like a mass of balloons but some strange spacecraft. After thinking this, he wrote "99 Luftballons".
Both the English and German versions of the song tell a story of ninety-nine balloons floating into the air, triggering an apocalyptic overreaction by the military force. The music was composed by Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, the keyboardist of Nena's band, while Karges wrote the original German lyrics. Kevin McAlea wrote the English version, titled "99 Red Balloons" (on an envelope, which he alleges he still has), which has a more satirical tone than the original.
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