99 Luftballons is a 1983 anti-war protest song by the West German Neue Deutsche Welle band Nena, written by guitarist Carlo Karges and keyboardist Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen. The lyrics were inspired by Karges attending a 1982 Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, where he watched balloons drift over the Berlin Wall and imagined them being mistaken by Soviet radar for enemy spacecraft or missiles, sparking a global war.
The song reflects the intense Cold War paranoia and fear of nuclear annihilation prevalent in the early 1980s. In the original German version, the 99 balloons are identified as UFOs, leading to a military escalation that results in a 99-year war leaving no victors. An English-language version titled “99 Red Balloons” was released in 1984 with different lyrics, where the balloons trigger faulty early warning systems; this version reached number 1 in the UK and several other countries, while the German original peaked at number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
English Version
You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
Set them free at the break of dawn
‘Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, “Something’s out there”
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
[Instrumental Break]
[Verse 2]
Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it’s red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
When ninety-nine red balloons go by
[Instrumental Break]
[Verse 2]
99 Decision Street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super-scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we’ve waited for
This is it, boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
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[Instrumental Break]
[Verse 3]
Ninety-nine knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a superhero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
[Bridge]
As ninety-nine red balloons go by
[Outro]
Ninety-nine dreams I have had
In every one, a red balloon
It’s all over and I’m standin’ pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go
