____ 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____

'til ___ __ ____ they were gone

Back at base bugs in the software

Flash the _______: "something's _______!"

Floating in the summer ___

Ninety-nine red balloons ____ ____

99 red ________

Floating in the ______ sky

Panic bells, it's red alert

There's ______ here from somewhere else

The ___ machine springs to life

Opens up one ______ ____

Focusing it on the sky

Where ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine decision street

Ninety-nine ministers meet

To worry, worry, super scurry

Call the _____ out in a hurry

This is what we've waited for

This is it, boys, _____ is ____

The _______ is on the line

As ninety-nine red balloons go by

Ninety-nine knights of the air

Ride super _________ jet fighters

Everyone's a super hero

_______ a captain kirk

With orders to _______

To ______and _______

Scramble in the ______ sky

Ninety-nine red balloons go by

As ninety-nine red balloons ___ ____

Ninety-nine ______ I have had

In every one a red balloon

It's all over and I'm standing pretty

In this dust that was a _____

If I could find a _______

Just to prove the world was here

And here is a red balloon

I think of you, and ____ ___ _____

While at a June 1982 concert by the Rolling Stones in West Berlin, Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges
noticed that balloons were being released. As he watched them move toward the horizon, he
noticed them shifting and changing shapes, where they looked like strange spacecraft (referred to
in the German lyrics as a "UFO"). He thought about what might happen if they floated over the
Berlin Wall to the Soviet sector.

• This was one of the songs in the '80s to make a point about the brinkmanship and
paranoia/hysteria surrounding the issue of war. The song talks about Nena and the listener buying
99 Balloons in a shop and letting them go, for fun. These balloons show up on the radar as
unidentified objects and both sides scramble planes and go to full alert to counteract a perceived
nuclear attack, when in fact it is the most childlike of things, a bunch of balloons.

• The song, though difficult to understand, is about the dreams of the German people that
were lost after World War II. The 99 balloons represent the many dreams that each person had. At
the end of the song, she just wants to prove that the German people did have dreams by finding
one balloon - she finds one balloon, a dream, and lets it go.

You

Dawn

One by one

Message

Out there

Southern sky

Go by

99 red ballons

Summer sky

Something

War machine

Eager eye

Men

Troops

This is war

The president
High tech

Everyone

Identify

Clarify

Classify

Summer sky

Go by

Dreams

City

Souvernir

Ballon

Let it go