Berlin's Brandenburg Gate

A city gate, not a triumphal arch

The gate was never a monument in the Roman sense. Berlin in the eighteenth century was ringed by a customs wall, and the Brandenburg Gate was one of eighteen openings in it, the one where the road to Brandenburg an der Havel began. That is where the name comes from. It is the only one of those gates still standing.

Frederick William II commissioned it, and Carl Gotthard Langhans built it between 1788 and 1791, taking the Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis as his model. It was called the Friedenstor, the gate of peace, and the reliefs between its columns show the labours of Heracles.

Twelve Doric columns form five passageways of differing widths. The widest, in the centre, was reserved for the royal family; everyone else used the narrower outer arches. The whole thing is sandstone, and stands twenty-six metres to the top of the sculpture. The two small flanking buildings, Haus Liebermann and Haus Sommer, were destroyed in the war and rebuilt as copies.

The goddess changed sides

This is the part most accounts get the wrong way round. The figure driving the chariot was not originally Victoria. Johann Gottfried Schadow's Quadriga, added in 1793, carried Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, holding a wreath of olive leaves — a fitting rider for a gate named after peace.

The change came through Napoleon. After routing the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt, he entered Berlin through the gate in October 1806 and had the Quadriga dismantled and carted to Paris as a trophy. It returned in 1814, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel reworked it: an Iron Cross set inside the wreath, a Prussian eagle above it. Only then did the goddess of peace become Victoria, goddess of victory, and the chariot was turned to face outward. The square below was renamed Pariser Platz.

Destruction and reconstruction

The Nazis used the gate as a stage, marching through it by torchlight in 1933 and putting the Quadriga to work in propaganda. By May 1945 the structure had taken more than three hundred artillery hits, and the Quadriga was destroyed outright.

The sculpture standing on the gate today is therefore not Schadow's. His survives only as a single horse's head, recovered from rubble and now in the Stadtmuseum Berlin. The rest is a copy, cast from the original plaster moulds in an unlikely piece of East–West cooperation: the East repaired the gate, the West funded the new Quadriga, and it went up in 1958. East Berlin's authorities promptly had the Iron Cross and the Prussian eagle taken off, considering them emblems of Prussian militarism. They were only restored in 1991, during repairs to damage done by celebrating crowds at New Year 1989.

Sealed, then opened

When the Wall went up on 13 August 1961, the gate was closed and left stranded inside the death strip, reachable from neither side. It stayed shut for twenty-eight years.

It became the address for anyone wanting to speak about division. Kennedy came in June 1963 and found the arches hung with red banners, put up by the East so that he could not see through. Reagan stood before it in June 1987 and called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall — a line that took its force from the setting.

One correction to the familiar story: the crowds climbed the Wall in front of the gate on the night of 9 November 1989, but the gate itself did not open. That came six weeks later, on 22 December, when Helmut Kohl walked through to meet Hans Modrow and more than a hundred thousand people watched.

The gate now

A full restoration of the sandstone ran from 2000 to 2002, and the gate was unveiled again on 3 October 2002, German Unity Day. Pariser Platz is closed to traffic, so the arches can be walked through freely.

Its modern role is as the country's default gathering place. Several hundred thousand people see in the New Year here at one of Europe's largest open-air parties. It is lit for mourning and for solidarity — in Ukrainian blue and yellow from the first days of the 2022 invasion, and for other events since. It also attracts protest: in September 2023 climate activists from Letzte Generation sprayed all six columns with orange paint from fire extinguishers, which soaked far enough into the porous sandstone that the clean-up required scaffolding and laser treatment and ran well past its initial thirty-five-thousand-euro estimate into six figures.

Visiting

The gate stands in Mitte, at Pariser Platz, served by the Brandenburger Tor S-Bahn and U-Bahn station. There is no ticket and no closing time. Early morning has the best light and the fewest people; after dark it is floodlit and, if anything, more striking.

Pariser Platz repays a slow look of its own. The American and French embassies stand on it, along with the rebuilt Hotel Adlon, the Akademie der Künste and Frank Gehry's DZ Bank building, whose extraordinary atrium is hidden behind a deliberately plain façade.

Almost everything else worth seeing is within a walk. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is two minutes south, the Reichstag and its glass dome just north — free to enter, but only with a booking made well in advance. Unter den Linden runs east towards Museum Island, and the Tiergarten opens out to the west.

What it stands for

The gate has meant peace, then conquest, then nationalism, then division, and now unity, without its stones changing much at all. That is the useful thing about it. A monument built to mark one thing has spent two hundred and thirty years being made to mean whatever the moment required, and the Quadriga has been dismantled, looted, destroyed, copied, stripped of its insignia and given them back.