Carlo Karges (31 July 1951 – 30 January 2002) was a German musician known for his work as a guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Nena.
He began developing his musical abilities as a student, when he started to play guitar and to compose his own songs, and thereafter played as part of a number of groups, including Tomorrow's Gift and Release Music Orchestra.
Karges died at the Eppendorf Clinic in Hamburg on 30 January 2002 at the age of 50, due to liver failure.
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.