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<blockquote data-quote="Old Man Jingles" data-source="post: 4284555" data-attributes="member: 18222">I always thought that song had too much drums &#039;up front&#039;.It was the disco period I guess.Carlo Karges wrote the lyrics of Nena&#039;s most famous song, after attending a 1982 Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, when they released a large mass of helium balloons into the air. He wondered how East German or Soviet forces might react if the balloons crossed the Berlin Wall, and thus he conceived the idea for the song about a major war resulting from misidentification of a mass of balloons.The lyrics of the original German version tell a story: 99 balloons are set free and are mistaken for UFOs, causing a general to send pilots to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots put on a large show of fire power. The display of force worries the nations along the borders and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_minister" target="_blank">defense ministers</a> on each side bang the drums of conflict to grab power for themselves. In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: &quot;99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger,&quot; which translates as, &quot;99 years of war have left no place for winners.&quot; The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a balloon. The final line of the piece is the same in German and English: &quot;Denk&#039; an dich und lass&#039; ihn fliegen,&quot; or &quot;I think of you and let it go.&quot; Surrealistically, we then hear the balloon float away.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Old Man Jingles, post: 4284555, member: 18222"] I always thought that song had too much drums 'up front'. It was the disco period I guess. Carlo Karges wrote the lyrics of Nena's most famous song, after attending a 1982 Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, when they released a large mass of helium balloons into the air. He wondered how East German or Soviet forces might react if the balloons crossed the Berlin Wall, and thus he conceived the idea for the song about a major war resulting from misidentification of a mass of balloons. The lyrics of the original German version tell a story: 99 balloons are set free and are mistaken for UFOs, causing a general to send pilots to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots put on a large show of fire power. The display of force worries the nations along the borders and the [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_minister']defense ministers[/URL] on each side bang the drums of conflict to grab power for themselves. In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: [I]"99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger,"[/I] which translates as, "99 years of war have left no place for winners." The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a balloon. The final line of the piece is the same in German and English: [I]"Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen,"[/I] or "I think of you and let it go." Surrealistically, we then hear the balloon float away. [/QUOTE]

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