Brandenburg Gate

The Brandenburg Gate is a neoclassical monumental gateway at the western end of Unter den Linden in central Berlin, on the site of an older city gate on the road to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel. It was built between 1788 and 1791 for King Frederick William II of Prussia to designs by Carl Gotthard Langhans, and is crowned by Johann Gottfried Schadow's quadriga, a goddess driving a four-horse chariot. Over two centuries it has served as a royal triumphal arch, a Nazi stage set, a fortified point on the Berlin Wall and finally a symbol of German reunification.

A simple gate with a drawbridge first pierced the ramparts here around 1670, and after the customs wall of 1734 was built the court architect Philipp Gerlach replaced it with a pair of baroque pylons. Frederick William II, who came to the throne in 1786, wanted a capital with monuments to rival Vienna, Paris and London, and in 1788 he put Langhans in charge of the royal works.

Langhans modelled the new gate on the Propylaea, the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens, making it one of the earliest examples of the Greek Revival in Germany. Twelve Doric columns form five passages, of which ordinary citizens were at first allowed to use only the outer two, and reliefs of the labours of Hercules and of centaurs fighting men decorate the walls. Originally named the Peace Gate, it marked a largely bloodless Prussian intervention in the Netherlands in 1787. It opened to traffic, still unfinished, in August 1791, and the quadriga was installed in 1793, facing east into the city.

After crushing Prussia at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, Napoleon became the first ruler to stage a triumphal procession through the gate, and he carried the quadriga off to Paris. Prussian troops brought it back after his defeat in 1814, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel reworked it to suit the gate's new role as a monument to victory: the goddess, first conceived as Eirene, the bringer of peace, became Victoria and received an Iron Cross and a Prussian eagle.

Weathering forced a long restoration from 1913 to 1926, interrupted by war and by street fighting, since government troops used the gate as a firing position during the Spartacist uprising of 1919 and the Kapp Putsch of 1920. Under Nazi Germany the gate became a party emblem and was placed on the great east–west axis planned for the rebuilt capital. It survived the Second World War still standing amid the ruins of Pariser Platz, but pitted by bullets and shell fragments; a single horse's head from the original quadriga is kept in a Berlin museum.

After 1945 the gate stood in the Soviet sector, right on the line with the British sector, and so on the boundary between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. During the East German uprising of 17 June 1953 three men climbed it and tore down the Soviet flag. In 1956 and 1957 East and West Berlin cooperated, despite bitter arguments, to repair the gate and recast the quadriga from a plaster cast made in 1942; the East German authorities replaced the Iron Cross with a wreath.

From 13 August 1961 the Berlin Wall ran just west of the gate, which stayed closed for more than 28 years. Plans to demolish it as a relic of Prussian militarism were dropped. Western leaders used it as a backdrop: John F. Kennedy visited in 1963, and on 12 June 1987 Ronald Reagan spoke there calling for the wall to be torn down. In the 1980s Richard von Weizsäcker, then mayor of West Berlin, declared: "The German Question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed."

Crowds gathered at the wall here after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, and on 22 December the crossing was reopened as the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through to meet the East German prime minister Hans Modrow. The official ceremony of German reunification was held at the gate on the night of 2 to 3 October 1990, after which the Iron Cross was restored to the quadriga.

A privately funded restoration costing six million euros was completed in 2002. Today the gate is closed to traffic and stands at the edge of a pedestrian square, serving as the main stage for national celebrations, commemorations and gatherings in Germany.