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A2

Leuchtturm

Nena

Language
German
Released
1983
Genre
neue deutsche welle
Level
A2
Difficulty score
584
Duration
3:14

How to study this song

Learning “Leuchtturm” means 41 entries at A2 — 12 German words, 7 adjectives and 22 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Start with the glossary: Bord and Ende come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 22 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

DEENESITFRPTNL
Bordboard, deck of a shipbordobordobordbordoboord van een schip
Endeendfinalfinefinfimeinde

This card holds 10 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

DEENESIT

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

Vocabulary words
12
Adjectives
7
Word combos
8
Expressions
10
Verb forms
22
Quiz questions
35

More German songs at this level

  • Auf uns — Andreas Bourani (2014)A2
  • Wir sind groß — Mark Forster (2016)A2
  • Vielleicht Vielleicht — MilleniumKid x JBS (2023)A2+
  • Verschwommen — Ski Aggu & Ericson (2026)A2

Background

About the song

«Leuchtturm» is the song that shows the other side of Nena. Most of the world knows the band for one record about balloons and a false alarm, but in Germany the group was a pop band with a whole album behind it, and this was the track that proved they could do something light, warm and completely unpolitical. It was the third single taken from their debut album, released on 25 April 1983, and it became one of the sounds of that German summer.

The band had been put together in West Berlin at the start of the decade. Gabriele Susanne Kerner, born in Hagen on 24 March 1960 and known since a childhood holiday in Spain by the nickname Nena, had sung with a local group called The Stripes until it broke up. She moved to Berlin with the drummer Rolf Brendel and there the five-piece took shape: Nena on lead vocals, Brendel on drums, Carlo Karges on guitar, Jörn-Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen on keyboards and Jürgen Dehmel on bass. The band took the singer’s nickname as its own name, which is why German sources are careful to distinguish Nena the band from Nena the singer, and why her later solo career carries the same word on the cover.

Their first album, simply called «Nena», appeared on 14 January 1983 on CBS. It was produced by Reinhold Heil and Manfred Praeker, both of them members of Spliff, the Berlin band that had grown out of the Nina Hagen Band, and it was recorded in Spliff’s own Berlin studio. That detail matters more than it looks: it is the thread that ties this very commercial pop record back to the harder, stranger end of the German new wave. The album went to number one in Germany and in Austria, stayed on the German chart for the better part of a year, and was certified platinum in Germany, in the Netherlands and in Japan, and gold in France.

«Leuchtturm» sits ninth on that record and runs a little over three minutes. The words and the music are credited to Jörn-Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen and to Nena Kerner herself, which makes it one of the songs on the album where the singer is also one of the authors. The saxophone that lifts the arrangement is played by David Sanborn, an American session musician far better known in jazz circles than in German pop, and it is the single most unexpected ingredient in the track.

What the song describes is a daydream, and the daydream keeps escalating. It starts as a promise to follow someone anywhere, to the far edge of the world, and settles on a picture of the two of them alone by the sea where the sun is shining. Then it climbs a lighthouse to look down at the world from above. Then a submarine turns up to collect them, the other person is made the captain, they go aboard, the doors are shut and they set off. The singer imagines diving after the fish and passing the time out at sea. By the last verse the boat is going down, the sun is about to set, they are already a long way out, and the lighthouse is no longer in sight — which is either romantic or slightly alarming, depending on how literally you take it. Then the opening lines come back, and the fantasy resets.

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FR
PT
NL
alleinealone, on our owna solasda soliseulsa sósalleen, op onszelf
festtight, firmlyfuertefortefortcom forçastevig

This card holds 5 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

DEENESITFRPTNL
gehI govoy, vevado, va’je vais, vavou, vaiik ga
gehn wirlet us govamosandiamoallons-yvamoslaten we gaan
kommcomevenvieniviensvemkom
willstyou wantquieresvuoitu veuxqueresjij wilt
willI wantquierovoglioje veuxqueroik wil
scheintshinesbrillasplendebrillebrilhaschijnt
seinto beestar, seressereêtreestar, serzijn
bistyou areeresseitu esésjij bent

This card holds 14 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For a learner of German this song is a gift, precisely because it is so small. There are barely seventy-seven different words in the whole lyric and the first verse is sung twice, so almost nothing has to be looked up twice. What is packed into those words, though, is most of the machinery of spoken German. There are SEPARABLE VERBS everywhere, and they are the single hardest structure for a beginner: the prefix leaves the front of the verb and lands at the end of the clause, so the sentence only makes sense once you have heard the last word. Here a submarine fetches the pair out of somewhere, the sun is about to go down, and doors get shut — three different separable verbs, each one split apart as it is sung. There are IMPERATIVES used as invitations rather than orders. There is the first-person-plural form used to make a suggestion, the German equivalent of saying «let us go». There are the two halves of the case system on display in four short lines: a masculine noun in the accusative when there is movement towards it, a dative plural with its extra ending on the noun itself.

And there is the colloquial 1980s German of the recording, which is worth flagging because it changes the spelling. The sung text drops final syllables constantly: the -e of the first person singular disappears, so what is written in a grammar book with an ending is sung without one; -en shrinks to -n, so the infinitive of «to see» loses a syllable; the adverb meaning «upwards» is clipped to a shorter, breezier form with an apostrophe in front of it. None of this is careless — it is how the language is actually spoken, and hearing it in a song is a faster lesson than reading about it.

Two of the words are also a lesson in how German builds vocabulary. The title is a COMPOUND: a verb meaning «to shine» welded to the noun for a tower, giving the shining tower, the lighthouse. The submarine is a compound too, and a doubly interesting one, because what is sung is the abbreviation of a much longer word for an under-sea boat — German has a habit of making a monster noun and then immediately shortening it back down to two letters and a hyphen.

The version that most people now watch is not the 1983 one. In 2002, twenty years after the band’s first single, Nena recorded a whole album of her old songs again with Fahrenkrog-Petersen, and the new «Leuchtturm» from that project got its own single release and its own video — which is the clip that circulates today as the official one. The card is dated 1983 because that is when the song was written, recorded and released; the moving pictures beside it are the ones made nineteen years later. Both are the same song, and hearing them next to each other is a small history lesson in what happened to German pop production between the two dates.

It is also worth placing the record inside the movement it belongs to. The NEUE DEUTSCHE WELLE — the German new wave — began at the end of the 1970s as a German-language answer to punk and new wave, with bands in Düsseldorf, Hamburg and West Berlin singing in their own language over cold synthesizers. The label itself first turned up in a distributor’s advertisement in August 1979 and was pushed into general use by the music journalist Alfred Hilsberg. By 1982 the major labels had noticed, and the movement’s second phase was far poppier, far more ironic and far more profitable than its first. Nena belongs squarely to that second phase. The wave broke almost as fast as it rose: by 1984 the market was saturated, the audience had tired of it, and most of the pioneers had walked away. «Leuchtturm» is one of the handful of records from those two commercial years that Germans still sing along to, which is a reasonable definition of a classic.

Did you know?

The song was the third single from the debut album, not the first and not the follow-up to it. The order was «Nur geträumt» in May 1982, «99 Luftballons» at the start of 1983 and «Leuchtturm» on 25 April 1983. What came a year later was the worldwide success: the German-language «99 Luftballons» climbed to number two on the American Hot 100 in 1984, kept off the top by Van Halen, while the English-language «99 Red Balloons» was number one in Britain in February 1984.

The saxophone solo is played by David Sanborn, the American alto player who worked with David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and James Taylor and later won several Grammys under his own name. Hiring him for a German pop single in 1983 was an unusually expensive idea, and it is the reason the record sounds warmer and more adult than most of its chart neighbours.

The producers, Reinhold Heil and Manfred «Manne» Praeker, were both members of Spliff, the Berlin band formed out of the Nina Hagen Band, and the album was cut in Spliff’s own studio. Heil went on to a long career writing film music, including the score for «Run Lola Run». He is frequently confused with Reinhold Mack, the producer of Queen and Falco — a different person entirely.

The seven-inch single was backed with «Kino», another track from the same album. The twelve-inch picture maxi added a second song, «Satellitenstadt», which is why collectors pay very different prices for two records with the same cover.

The song turns up in «Gib Gas – Ich will Spaß», Wolfgang Büld’s 1983 road movie about the German new wave, in which Nena also appears on screen. The film is now watched mostly as a documentary of what that scene looked like, complete with the cars and the haircuts.

It has been covered from both ends of the German musical spectrum: by Heino, the Schlager singer, in 2013 — Nena said publicly that his version was honest and true to his own style — and by the country-rock band The BossHoss in 2016.

The 2002 re-recording came from «20 Jahre – Nena feat. Nena», an anniversary album on which Nena revisited her back catalogue with her old keyboard player. Several tracks on it were turned into duets with guests such as Kim Wilde, Udo Lindenberg and Joachim Witt, but the new «Leuchtturm» was not one of them: she sings it alone. Released as a single in December 2002, it put the song back in the German top ten nineteen years after the original.

Carlo Karges, the guitarist and the author of the words to «99 Luftballons», died in 2002, shortly before the surviving members of the band played «Leuchtturm» together again at a concert in Frankfurt. The band itself had quietly dissolved in 1987, with no announcement, after four albums.

For a learner the title is a free vocabulary lesson. German makes new nouns by gluing old ones together, so the word for lighthouse is built out of the verb for shining and the noun for tower. The submarine in the song is the same trick in reverse: a very long compound meaning «under-sea boat», immediately abbreviated down to a single letter, a hyphen and the word for boat.

Charts & streaming

The single was released on 25 April 1983 by CBS. In Germany it peaked at number two and stayed on the chart for seventeen weeks, finishing 1983 as the thirty-second best-selling single of the year. In Austria it entered on 1 June 1983, reached number three and spent ten weeks on the list. In the Netherlands it entered the Single Top 100 on 23 July 1983, peaked at number seven and lasted eight weeks. No sales certification for the 1983 single has been recorded in any of these markets.

The album it came from did considerably better than the single. «Nena», released on 14 January 1983, went to number one in Germany, where it held a chart place for forty-three weeks, and to number one in Austria for thirty-three weeks; it reached number twenty in Switzerland. It was certified platinum in Germany for half a million copies, platinum in the Netherlands, platinum in Japan and gold in France, for something close to nine hundred thousand copies across those four markets alone.

Nineteen years later the song sold all over again. The re-recorded «Leuchtturm (New Version)» was released as a single on 16 December 2002, entered the German chart on 6 January 2003, climbed to number seven and stayed on the list for seventeen weeks, ending 2003 as the fifty-second best-selling single of that year in Germany. It reached number twenty-one in Austria, with fifteen weeks on the chart, and number seventy-nine in Switzerland.

The anniversary album that produced it, «20 Jahre – Nena feat. Nena», was released in October 2002 on Warner Music and outsold most of Nena’s original catalogue: number one in Austria for fifty-two weeks, number two in Germany for fifty-five weeks, number five in Switzerland and number ten in the Netherlands, with triple platinum in Germany, double platinum in Austria and platinum in Switzerland — better than a million copies in those three countries. Very few German acts have managed to make an album of old songs sell more than the originals did.