Page 13 - TheWord#16

www.thewordmedia.org.uk SOCIALIST SONGS February 2017. 13

99RED BALLOONS NENA

Original German version English version

Do you have some time for me You and I in a little toy shop
Then I’ll sing a song for you buy a bag of balloons with
About 99 balloons the money we’ve got
On their way to the horizon Set them free at the break of dawn
Are you perhaps thinking of me? ‘Til one by one, they were gone
Then I’ll sing a song for you Back at base, bugs in the software
About 99 balloons Flash the message, “Something’s out there”
And that something (like the war) Floating in the summer sky
comes from such a thing (the balloons) 99 red balloons go by.

99 balloons 99 red balloons
On their way to the horizon floating in the summer sky
They thought they were UFOs from space Panic bells, it’s red alert
So a general sent There’s something here from somewhere red
A flying squad out there The war machine springs to life
To raise the alarm if it was true Opens up one eager eye
Yet there on the horizon were Focusing it on the sky
Only 99 balloons Where 99 red balloons go by.

99 jet planes 99 Knights of the air
Each one was a great warrior ride super-high-tech jet fighters
Thought that they were Captain Kirk Everyone’s a Superhero
There were great fireworks Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
The neighbors didn’t understand anything With orders to identify
And felt equally provoked To clarify and classify
Yet there they shot on the horizon Scramble in the summer sky
At 99 balloons As 99 red balloons go by.

99 war ministers 99 Decision Street
Matches and petrol cans 99 ministers meet
Thought that they were clever people To worry, worry, super-scurry
Already caught wind of great spoils[of war] Call the troops out in a hurry
Shouted: War, and wanted power This is what we’ve waited for
Man, who would have thought This is it boys, this is war
That one day it would come to this The president is on the line
Because of 99 balloons As 99 red balloons go by.

99 years of war 99 dreams I have had
Don’t leave a place for victors In every one a red balloon
There are no ministers of war any more It’s all over and I’m standin’ pretty
And No jet planes either In this dust that was a city
Today I’m doing my rounds If I could find a souvenier
Seeing the world lying in ruins Just to prove the world was here...
Found a balloon And here is a red balloon
Think of you and let it fly I think of you and let it go.

Gabriele Susanne Kerner (Nena) were being released. As he watched themselves. In the end, a 99-year war
was born on 24 March 1960 in Hagen, them move toward the horizon, he results from the otherwise harmless
North Rhine-Westphalia, West Ger- noticed them shifting and chang- flight of balloons, causing devastation
many while her family lived in the ing shapes, where they looked like on all sides without a victor. At the
nearby town of Breckerfeld. She spent strange spacecraft (referred to in the end, the singer walks through the dev-
the earliest part of her childhood in German lyrics as a “UFO”). He thought astated ruins and lets loose a balloon,
Breckerfeld and later lived in Hagen. about what might happen if they watching it fly away.
She acquired her nickname, based on floated over the Berlin Wall to the So-
the Spanish word “niña”, or “little girl”, viet sector. The English version retains the
at the age of three, while on a vacation The lyrics of the original German spirit of the original narrative, but
to Spain with her parents. In 1977 she version tell a story: 99 balloons are many of the lyrics are translated poet-
left high school before graduation, mistaken for UFOs, causing a general ically rather than directly translated:
and in the three following years she to send pilots to investigate. Finding red helium balloons are casually re-
was trained as a goldsmith. nothing but child’s balloons, the pi- leased by an anonymous civilian into
An end of the world song written lots decide to put on a show and shoot the sky and are registered as missiles
at the height of the cold war. While them down. The display of force wor- by a faulty early warning system; the
at a June 1982 concert by the Rolling ries the nations along the borders and balloons are mistaken for military air-
Stones in West Berlin, Nena’s guitar- the war ministers on each side bang craft which results in panic and even-
ist Carlo Karges noticed that balloons the drums of conflict to grab power for tually nuclear war.