Stranger things we would never have predicted

A person known to me was counting down the days for quite a while until the moment arrived last week: Stranger Things 2 was released.

This Netflix series caused quite a stir last year with its Stephen King-type ’80s-soaked nostalgia, and the second series looks cut from the same cloth, right down to the Reagan-Bush ’84 Presidential election campaign posters.

We all know about this kind of appeal to a rosy view of the past, no matter how bad the actuality was. When the Berlin Wall came down, freeing the millions of East Germans who’d been spied upon by the secret police for decades, who’d have thought people would develop a fondness for those not-so-good old days? Hence ostalgie, the nostalgia for Ost, or East, Germany.