This week's theme Orgullo Patrio, or "National/Homeland Pride", is a bit of a tough one for me.
As you probably know was I born in Hamburg in Northern Germany, and I can't say I grew up with much National Pride as such, and really consider myself more of a proud European.

A lot of our school curriculum in the 70s was about the Nazi era, rightly so, of course. However, that also meant that a lot of our history before the 20th century, wasn't covered as much as it should have been.
One reason was, and still is, that Hitler hijacked a lot of traditional stuff for his own causes, which has left a stain on some material, that was originally quite innocent.

However, since I've moved to the UK many years ago things have changed a bit and the younger generation feels more comfortable with waving German flags as the distance to the 1930s grows. That is good, as long as they still know what happened in the past for it not to be repeated. I'm afraid that I hear stories, where kids have no idea about it or even care.

The Song

Having said all of the above though, the theme gives me the opportunity to sing another song in German, which is a bit of an anti-war song, so works for me. Nena's song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 was part of the "Neue Deutsche Welle" (New German Wave), when songs sung in German gained incredible popularity; some of them had been transferred into other languages, like this one, or "Major Tom" by Peter Schilling

The song was a bit of protest song against the Cold War; the fear of an atomic war was very present, more so for us living in the middle of Europe.
Seems we're there again looking at what's going on in the world right now.

Anyway, I hope you like this short and purely acoustic version.

Lyrics

Source YouTube