Brandenburg Gate

• 1. Introduction

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  The Brandenburg Gate has stood at the heart of Berlin since 1791, and in that time it has been topped by a Soviet flag, sealed off by a wall that split a city in two, and stormed by climate activists with orange spray paint. It was built by a king who felt his capital was embarrassing. It was looted by Napoleon. It was nearly moved to make way for a road. Few structures anywhere have been fought over, argued about, and pressed into political service so relentlessly. How did a neoclassical city gate - designed after a Greek temple in Athens - become the single most charged symbol in modern German history? And what does it mean that the same monument has stood for Prussian glory, Nazi spectacle, Cold War division, and reunified peace, sometimes within the span of a single decade?

• 2. A King's Ambition

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  Frederick William II was in his early forties when he inherited the Prussian throne in 1786, and he had a problem he could not ignore. His uncle Frederick the Great had made Prussia a military power that could not be dismissed in European politics, but Berlin was still embarrassing by comparison with Vienna, Paris, or London. The cultural monuments that announced a capital city were simply missing. Frederick William II decided to fix that. He summoned architects to Berlin, including Carl Gotthard Langhans from Breslau - the city now called Wroclaw in Poland - and appointed him director of the royal Office of Works in 1788. Langhans had designed neoclassical buildings before, but nothing in the Greek style. The gate would be both his first and his last significant work in that mode. By 1792 he had moved on to a small neo-Gothic building for the New Garden in Potsdam. Construction on the new gate ran from 1788 to 1791, and Langhans drew his design directly from the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens. Both structures share a front with six Doric columns, though the Propylaea's columns carry a triangular pediment rather than the flat attic storey Langhans chose. The gate was originally named the Friedenstor - the Peace Gate - and opened to traffic in August 1791 before construction was even finished. It was intended to celebrate a Prussian military intervention in the Netherlands that had restored the Dutch king, who happened to be Frederick William's brother-in-law, to power.

• 3. Columns, Horses, and Hercules

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  Twelve fluted Doric columns support the gate, six to each side, and together they form five passageways through the structure. Ordinary citizens were originally confined to the two outermost passages on each side; the central archway was reserved for the royal family and, from 1814 onward, the Pfuel family alone. The walls between the column pairs carry classicizing reliefs of the Labours of Hercules. The sixteen metopes along each of the long faces show scenes from Greek mythology in relief, many echoing the Parthenon by depicting centaurs fighting men. The Doric order is mostly Greek in character, with flat fillets between the flutes rather than the sharp arrises typical of Roman work, but the corners follow the Roman rather than the Greek solution to what architectural historians call the Doric corner conflict. Statues of Minerva and Mars were added to niches in the furthest side walls only in the 19th century. Above everything stands the quadriga - a chariot drawn by four horses - created by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow. It was the first quadriga group made since antiquity, constructed from copper sheets hammered into moulds. Those moulds were kept, a decision that would prove fortunate more than once. The goddess originally represented Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, but after the Napoleonic Wars she was redesignated as Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, and given an Iron Cross standard topped by a crowned Imperial eagle.

• 4. Napoleon and the Stolen Quadriga

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  After the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, Napoleon entered Berlin and helped himself to the quadriga, shipping it to Paris. The theft stood for years until General Ernst von Pfuel led the Prussian occupation of Paris following Napoleon's defeat in 1814 and brought the sculpture home. The Kaiser was so grateful that he granted the Pfuel family the permanent right to pass through the central archway - a privilege that lasted from 1814 all the way to 1919. Karl Friedrich Schinkel redesigned the returned quadriga to suit the gate's new identity as a Prussian triumphal arch: the goddess Victoria received the Prussian eagle and an Iron Cross on her lance, set within a wreath of oak leaves. After 1900 the gate itself began to deteriorate. Weathering and environmental damage sent stone fragments falling from the structure, and comprehensive renovation work began in 1913. Then the outbreak of World War I interrupted the work, and it was not completed until 1926. During the November Revolution the quadriga suffered further damage, and the gate was used as a firing position by government troops during the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and again during the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Restoration work under Kurt Kluge proceeded with the quadriga encased in a wooden structure. Berliners began calling it the highest horse stable in Berlin. Sculptor Wilhelm Wandschneider worked on the sandstone reliefs and remodeled one of the centaur metopes with an entirely different motif.

• 5. Division and the Wall

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  After Germany's surrender in 1945, the Brandenburg Gate found itself standing in the Soviet occupation zone, directly adjacent to the British sector boundary that would later become the border between East and West Berlin. The Soviet flag was raised atop it immediately. On the 17th of June 1953, during the East German uprising, three men climbed the gate and tore down the Soviet flag, raising in its place the black-red-gold tricolour shared by both German states at that time. One of those three men, Wolfgang Panzer, disappeared shortly afterward and most likely paid for the act with his life. The standard tricolour flew from the gate from 1949 until 1959, when the East German authorities replaced it with the East German flag to mark the 10th anniversary of the state's founding. East and West Berlin cooperated - despite fierce mutual accusations - on restoring the war-damaged monument. The quadriga was entirely recreated using a 1942 plaster cast, with sculptor Otto Schnitzer and the traditional Hermann Noack foundry in Friedenau completing the work. Restoration finished on the 14th of December 1957. When construction began on the Berlin Wall on Barbed Wire Sunday, the 13th of August 1961, the gate was sealed. West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt had returned that same day from a federal election campaign tour in West Germany; he joined the crowds who gathered on the western side to protest. The wall passed directly by the gate's western face and kept it closed for the entirety of the Berlin Wall period. In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited the gate, and the Soviets hung large red banners across it so he could not see into East Berlin. On the 12th of June 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan stood before it and addressed Mikhail Gorbachev directly: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

• 6. The Gate Opens Again

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  Thousands gathered at the wall on the 9th of November 1989 to celebrate its fall. On the 22nd of December 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through the Brandenburg Gate border crossing to be greeted by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow. That same evening, the conductor Leonard Bernstein led the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the newly reopened gate. In the concluding "Ode to Joy" movement, Bernstein changed the word Freude - "Joy" - to Freiheit, meaning "Freedom". On the 2nd and the 3rd of October 1990, the gate was the site of the official ceremony marking German reunification; at the stroke of midnight on the 3rd, the black-red-gold flag of a reunified Germany was raised over it. The physical refurbishment that followed cost 6 million euros and was completed privately; the gate reopened on the 3rd of October 2002 for the 12th anniversary of reunification. On that occasion the Berlin office of Kardorff Ingenieure introduced a new lighting concept to emphasise the gate as the pre-eminent building on the Pariser Platz. For the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall in 2009, more than a thousand foam domino tiles, each over 2.5 metres tall, were lined up along the former wall's route through the city centre. Chancellor Angela Merkel walked through the gate alongside Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland's Lech Walesa. The domino wall was toppled in stages converging on the gate. After Germany won the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the national football team held their victory rally in front of it.

• 7. Living Monument

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  The gate today stands closed to vehicle traffic, and the Pariser Platz around it has become a cobblestone pedestrian zone. It serves as the finish line of the Berlin Marathon and hosted street events during the 2009 IAAF World Championships in Athletics and the 2018 European Athletics Championships. On the 5th of January 2015, the gate's lights were deliberately shut off in protest against a demonstration by the far-right anti-Islamic group Pegida - a use of darkness as political statement that would have been inconceivable in the gate's first two centuries. In February 2022 it was lit in the colours of Ukraine following the Russian invasion. On the 7th of October 2023 it was lit in the colours of Israel after the October 7 attacks. Then, on the 17th of September 2023, members of the climate activist group Last Generation sprayed the gate's columns orange using fire extinguishers. Fourteen people were detained by Berlin Police. Berlin's mayor Kai Wegner said the activists were not only damaging the historic gate but also "our free discourse about the important issues of our time and future". One horse's head from the quadriga destroyed in World War II survived the war and is kept today in the collection of the Markisches Museum, a quiet remnant of the sculpture Napoleon once carried to Paris and that German craftsmen have now rebuilt three separate times.