In living memory of the history around us

In 2014 I was sitting in a bar in the Georgian mountain village of Kazbekhi, watching Associated Press TVNews reports from Kiev where emotions were running high. The Russians were strongly suspected of shooting down a Malaysian airliner in Ukrainian airspace.

Was it a precursor to Russian military action against the former constituent republic of the Soviet Union, everyone in Kiev and Kazbekhi, alike wanted to know? Would the Russians invade?

Six years before, the Russians had done just that against the Georgians.

“If the bastards come over the border at us again, it will be down that road,” said my local (ex-Georgian military spook) drinking buddy Zha-Zha, nodding towards the two-lane “highway” just outside the pub.

The border, said Zha-Zha, was less than 15km away.

A few days before, I’d accompanied Zha-Zha to Heroes Square in the capital Tbilisi.

The names of the 169 Georgians who died in the so-called Five Day War in 2008 are carved on this marble memorial but history felt much more immediate sitting in that little bar overlooking the road to Russia.

The history books came alive again the next day when our group of journos, heading back towards Tbilisi, stopped for lunch at Sighnaghi.

I went walkabout instead, getting Zha-Zha to co-opt an off-duty fireman to take me round the little town in the sidecar of his elderly BMW motorcycle.

We stopped at the workshop of his father, a rather wizened tin worker who jury-rigged parts for minor household repairs. Half-hidden on one of the walls was an old black-and-white picture – clearly cut from a book or magazine – of Georgia’s most (in)famous son, Josef Stalin.

There were many people of the older generation that recalled Stalinism (despite the atrocities the man committed against his fellow Georgians) with pride. But nowhere have I been that I have experienced so much living history as much as Berlin.

Ironically, I visited the German capital in the company of APTN’s Peter Voigt, the television cameraman who would later be based in Kiev in the aftermath of the airliner downing. He’d see the effects of a Russian invasion first hand.

Pete, like myself, is a student of military action and everywhere we looked in Berlin we saw signs of two of the major conflicts of the 20th century – World War 2 and the Cold War.

We landed late in the evening and took a taxi past the abandoned Spandau prison complex to the Hilton Hotel in the brightly lit centre of the city. The view from my room was captivating. Just across the road was the floodlit French Cathedral of the Gendarmenmarkt.

The next morning we explored the precinct around the hotel. The place reeked of wealth. Everything was clean and new and horribly expensive. For the first (and only) time in my life, I saw a Bugatti Veyron.

I turned to Pete and muttered something along the lines that it was hardly surprising the Berlin Wall fell if the poor commies had to be confronted by such elegance and conspicuous opulence on a daily basis.

Then we reached the famous Checkpoint Charlie crossing point between the eastern and western halves of the previously divided city and realised we’d been behind the Iron Curtain the entire time!

There’s not much of the wall left standing but Pete and I filmed what we could that afternoon. One image he couldn’t resist was a hole in the wall which looked through onto a crowded parking lot.

It was only when researching the city on the internet back at the hotel that I discovered the building behind us as we’d filmed had housed Herman Göring’s Luftwaffe Air Ministry during the Second World War.

The parking lot was on the site of the former headquarters of the Nazi secret police more widely known as the Gestapo.

Later we walked across another completely unremarkable parking lot. Under our feet was the Führerbunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Somewhat overwhelmed by the moment of our surroundings, we stopped for a moment at the Brandenburg Gate.

Yes, that monument where, in 1987, US president Ronald Reagan exhorted his Soviet counterpart: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

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