In the James Bond film Octopussy, the fictional agent – played by a Roger Moore armed with a rising eyebrow as well as a Walther PPK revolver – infiltrates a circus in the East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt. This particularly bizarre episode of the spy franchise even sees Moore dressing as a clown. The Karl-Marx-Stadt scenes were actually filmed in Oxfordshire, as 1980s East Germany was out of bounds for Hollywood film crews.  The real Karl-Marx-Stadt was then somewhere deeply foreign, other and communist, and this was instantly communicated by its name. In 1990, the residents of the city decided…

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