The music was composed by Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, the keyboardist of Nena's band, while Karges wrote the original German lyrics. (The word in the German lyrics 'UFO') He thought about what might happen if they floated over the Berlin Wall to the Soviet sector.īoth the English and German versions of the song tell a story of 99 balloons floating into the air, triggering an apocalyptic overreaction by military forces. 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. While at a Rolling Stones concert in Berlin, Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges noticed that balloons were being released. The only difference is the missing counterpart to the German syllable '-zig' in 'Neunundneunzig'. The title '99 Red Balloons' almost scans correctly with the syllables falling in the right places within the rhythm of the first lines of lyrics, with 'red' replacing 'Luft'.

The name is derived from Luft, German for air, but the meaning of Luft does not qualify the type of balloon. A Luftballon is a colourful toy balloon, rather than a balloon for transport or research. The translation of the title is sometimes given as 'Ninety-Nine Air Balloons', however 'Ninety-Nine Balloons' is also correct. When it made the charts in the United States, most US radio DJs incorrectly assumed that '99 Luftballons' translated to English as '99 Red Balloons' and spoke the number 99 in English, saying 'Ninety-nine Luftballoons.' The German version topped the Australian charts for five weeks and the New Zealand charts for one week. In 1984, the original German version also peaked at #2 on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart and the English-language version topped the UK Singles Chart. '99 Luftballons' reached #1 in West Germany in 1983. Originally sung in German, it was later re-recorded in English as '99 Red Balloons'.

'99 Luftballons' is a Cold War-era protest song by the German singer Nena.

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