Career
He wrote the lyrics of Nena"s most famous song, "99 Luftballons", released in 1984. He was attending a 1982 Rolling Stones concert at the Waldbühne (the "Forest Theatre") in West Berlin, when they released a large mass of helium balloons into the air. He wondered how East German or Soviet forces might react if the balloons crossed the Berlin Wall, and thus he conceived the idea for the song about a major war resulting from misidentification of a mass of balloons.
In 1981 he joined Gabriele "Nena" Kerner, Rolf Brendel, Jürgen Dehmel, and Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen in establishing the eponymous band Nena.
Carlo died at the Eppendorf Clinic on 30 January 2002 at the age of 50, due to liver failure. He was buried in Hamburg"s Ohlsdorf Cemetery.
