Gabriele Susanne Kerner (born 24 March 1960), better known by her stage name Nena, is a German singer who rose to international fame in 1983 as the lead vocalist of the band Nena with the Neue Deutsche Welle song “99 Luftballons”. In that same year, the band re-recorded this song in English as “99 Red Balloons”. Nena’s re-recording of some of the band’s old hit songs as a solo artist, produced by the co-composer of most of them, her former Nena band colleague and keyboard player Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, rekindled her solo career in 2002. Combined with the success of the Nena band years, she has sold over 25 million records, making her the most successful German pop singer in chart history.

Gabriele Susanne Kerner was born on 24 March 1960 in Hagen, West Germany, while her family lived in the nearby town of Breckerfeld. She spent the earliest part of her childhood in Breckerfeld and later lived in Hagen. She acquired her nickname “Nena” while on a vacation to Mallorca, Spain with her parents. Nena is a Catalan word meaning “girl”. In 1977, she left high school before graduation, and in the three following years she was trained as a goldsmith.

Nena’s musical career began on 2 July 1979 when guitarist Rainer Kitzmann founded The Stripes and, on the basis of having seen her dancing at a local disco, asked her to audition for the position of the lead singer. The group, based in Hagen, performed songs with English lyrics and had a minor hit with the song “Ecstasy”, but never achieved mainstream success and disbanded on 3 March 1982.[6] However, The Stripes’s record company, CBS, offered Nena a record deal if she would move to Berlin and make music with German lyrics. In May 1982, Nena and her then-boyfriend Rolf Brendel moved to West Berlin, where they met future band members guitarist Carlo Karges, keyboard player Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, and bass player Jürgen Dehmel. Together, they formed the band Nena. In June 1982, they released their first single, “Nur geträumt”, which became an instant hit in Germany after the band appeared on the German television show Musikladen on 21 August 1982. The single reportedly sold 40,000 copies the day after the song appeared on the show and reached No. 2 in the German charts.

In 1983, the band released its first album Nena, which contained the singles “99 Luftballons” and “Leuchtturm”. “99 Luftballons” became a number one hit in West Germany and the Netherlands in 1983 and went on to major international chart success the following year, an English version hitting No. 1 in the UK and the original German version hitting No. 2 in the US, behind Van Halen’s “Jump”. In 1984, Casey Kasem’s radio show American Top 40 introduced a “mixed” version of the song, “splicing” the German and English versions together. It was also a huge hit in many other countries, it is one of the best-known German rock songs in many parts of the world.

In May 1984, while on a tour in the UK, Nena made the headlines of the British red-top press for having unshaved armpits. While not uncommon in continental Europe at the time, this was considered unusual in English-speaking countries to the extent that some consider it an explanation for the commercial failure of the follow-ups to “99 Luftballons”. Baffled by the attention generated, Nena asked her manager’s girlfriend to shave her and has remained clean shaved ever since. Referring to the “huge indignation” the issue raised, Nena, in her memoirs published in 2005, wrote, “Can a girl from Hagen, who dreams of the big wide world and is in love with Mick Jagger, have no idea that girls can’t under any circumstances have hair under the arm? Yes she can. I simply had no idea!”

Although “99 Luftballons” was the Band Nena’s only hit in the English-speaking world, the band continued to enjoy success in several European countries in the following years including with the single Irgendwie, irgendwo, irgendwann. Nena’s next international single “Just a Dream” (an English language re-issue of “Nur geträumt”) reached No. 70 in the UK charts in 1984; it had “Indianer” on the B-side. A dance version of “Just a Dream” was released in the 1990s to a new audience and became a club anthem. The band split in 1987 and Nena went solo thereafter.

Nena’s first solo album Wunder gescheh’n was released on 5 November 1989. The title track (German for “Miracles Happen”), composed by Nena herself, relates to the fact that Nena was at the time pregnant with twins, but release of the album that appeared just four days before the fall of the Berlin Wall (on 9 November) and the fact that she performed the song at the end of the Konzert für Berlin three days later has ever since associated it with that historic event. It was to prove to be her last major hit of the 20th century as throughout the 1990s her albums and singles – although often critically acclaimed – were less commercially successful. In 1993, following the indifferent performance of her second solo album Bongo Girl, Sony decided not to renew Nena’s recording contract, and the label which distributed her third, RMG Music Entertainment, disappeared shortly afterwards. In 1995 Nena and her growing family moved from Berlin to Hamburg, borrowing money from a family friend in order to do so since her bank declined to extend credit.