Our Reaction to Nena's '99 Luftballons Lyrics Explained!

Nena was a German Neue Deutsche Welle band formed in West Berlin in 1981. In 1983 and 1984, their German-language song "99 Luftballons" reached number one in the singles charts of countries around the world.
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Learn German with Nena's '99 Luftballons': Lyrics Explained & English Translation : • Learn German with Nena...
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[@MaxSujyGermany]

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[@Trichromasie]

4:28 I want to clarify something here: Yes, "Geist" translates as "Ghost", but in this case the translation is incorrect. “Spirit of time” would be correct. We use the same word for “ghost” and “spirit”.

[@pyrointeam]

Zeitgeist doesn't mean Time Ghost .. Geist is German for Mind, Spirit, Ghost so it is rather "Spirit of the Time/Age" and has nothing to do with Ghosts.

[@MrGANZALT]

th-cam.com/video/hiwgOWo7mDc/w-d-xo.html - English Version 99 Red-Balloons
th-cam.com/video/Fpu5a0Bl8eY/w-d-xo.html - German Version 99 Luftballons
:-)

[@eisikater1584]

That was a good explanation of the song, but I disagree with the conclusion. Especially that the red balloons should somehow represent people trying to flee from the GDR (east Germany), that's too far-fetched for me, and he is so focused on the USSR as the enemy that he doesn't even consider that the balloons are RED, so my interpretation of the song back then was different (and still is): There's something suspicious going on in "the East", and it's the Americans (or "the West", or NATO, or the capitalist system) who send up their fighter jets to fight something "from the communists" that they only hallucinate and doesn't really exist (the "red balloons"), thus starting the 3rd world war.
I couldn't know in 1983 that in 1986 I would be drafted into the west German army. There was a common draft for all able young men to serve there 15 months with little loopholes, but I could avoid the worst and was drawn into telint which meant that I didn't touch a gun very often. Instead we were trained to spy on "the Russians", as well as they spied on us. One officer once said to me, "The best way to avoid a war is knowing what the enemy is up to, and let them know that we know." Of course we knew that the "enemy" was doing the same, but telint people mostly agreed on that stance, while other army departments didn't. Nobody here could imagine in 1987 that the Soviet Union would collapse so quickly and Germany would be reunified. I remember the chaos that broke out when the East Germans, who had been socialist / communist for 40 years, suddenly got confronted with the dark sides of brutal western capitalism, but that would be a different story.
Sorry this comment got so long, but I had to elaborate a bit to explain the situation to young people who maybe weren't even born back then. Maybe it also helps a bit to understand the situation we now are in, and decide for yourself who are the good guys and the bad guys in a war.

[@4Astaroth]

I think you did a very good job here to clarify the standpoints of that era. It's always hard for Americans or just people outside of Germany to put these things into context.

[@giniinthebottle5777]

oh, my former crush

[@Schmusie1988]

You should react to BABYMETAL x Electric Callboy - RATATATA ;) :D

[@Erythrogoobler]

This incident, which took place about half a year after the song was released, shows that its story was not far-fetched: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident