The Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor) is an 18th-century neoclassical gateway in the Mitte district of Berlin, standing where the boulevard Unter den Linden meets Ebertstraße, with Pariser Platz on its eastern side and the Tiergarten park to the west. Carl Gotthard Langhans built it for King Frederick William II of Prussia between 1788 and 1791, modelled on the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, and Johann Gottfried Schadow's copper Quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses, was first raised on top of it in 1793. The gate is about 26 metres high to the top of the Quadriga and 62.5 metres wide. Napoleon carried off its sculpture in 1806, the Nazis marched through it in 1933, the Berlin Wall sealed it from 1961 to 1989, and since reunification in 1990 it has been the best-known symbol of a united Germany.
1788–1791: Langhans Builds a Peace Gate in the Customs Wall
A gate stood here before Langhans. When Berlin built its Customs Wall (Akzisemauer) in 1734, the court architect Philipp Gerlach put up a pair of Baroque pylons at the point where the road left for Brandenburg an der Havel, the old capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. That road gave the gate its name.
Frederick William II came to the throne in 1786 wanting a capital to rival Vienna, Paris and London. He brought Langhans from Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) and made him director of the Royal Office of Works in 1788. Langhans's replacement gate was his first major work in the Greek style. It stands on twelve fluted Doric columns, six on each side, forming five passageways; ordinary citizens could use only the outer two on each side, while the wide central opening was reserved for the royal family. Each column is 13.5 metres tall. Reliefs of the Labours of Hercules decorate the walls between the columns, and 32 metopes carry scenes from Greek mythology, many of centaurs fighting men in the manner of the Parthenon.
The monument was first called the Friedenstor, or Peace Gate, and celebrated a short Prussian intervention in the Netherlands in 1787 that restored his brother-in-law, the Dutch stadtholder William V, with little resistance. It opened to traffic in August 1791 before it was quite finished. Schadow's Quadriga, hammered from copper sheets in moulds by the coppersmith Emanuel Jury, went up in mid-1793, facing east into the city. The side wings, lower and in the same Doric order, housed customs officials until the Customs Wall was abolished in 1860.
27 October 1806: Napoleon Rides Through and Takes the Quadriga
After Prussia's defeat at Jena and Auerstedt in October 1806, Napoleon entered Berlin on 27 October and became the first ruler to use the gate for a triumphal procession. He then took the gate's crown. Under the supervision of Dominique-Vivant Denon, who was gathering conquered art for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre, the Quadriga was lifted down in early December 1806, broken down into twelve crates and sent off on 21 December. It travelled by water to Hamburg, by sea and up the Rhine, and through French canals to Paris, arriving on 17 May 1807. Napoleon's plan to mount it on a triumphal arch, and later on the Porte Saint-Denis, never happened; the group was restored and kept in the Louvre.
For eight years the gate stood empty, with only the iron mounting rod of the goddess sticking up from the attic. Berliners took the bare spike as a daily reminder of the defeat.
1814: The Quadriga Comes Home and the Square Becomes Pariser Platz
Allied troops, including Prussians, captured Paris on 31 March 1814. Within days the Quadriga was found, packed into 15 crates and sent back overland through Belgium and the Rhineland; on Prussian soil the convoy turned into a triumphal parade, reaching Zehlendorf on the edge of Berlin on 9 June. After repairs at the Grunewald hunting lodge it was back on the gate in time for the king's victory entry that summer.
It came back changed. Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed a new standard for the goddess: an oak wreath around an Iron Cross, topped by the Prussian eagle. From then on she was Victoria, goddess of victory, rather than the peace figure Langhans had intended, and the Peace Gate became a Prussian triumphal arch. The square on the east side, until then simply the Quarrée, was renamed Pariser Platz in 1814 to mark the capture of Paris. Ernst von Pfuel, the officer who oversaw the return, earned his family the right to drive through the central passage alongside the royal family, a privilege that lasted until 1919.
30 January 1933: An SA Torchlight March Through the Gate
The gate's next symbolic moment belonged to the Nazis. On the evening of 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, the SA and SS held torchlit parades through Berlin, and the SA columns marched through the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate what the party called its seizure of power.
Under the Nazi plans for "World Capital Germania", the gate sat on a new east-west axis. A seven-kilometre section running from the gate to Adolf-Hitler-Platz, now Theodor-Heuss-Platz, opened in 1939. Further plans would have moved the side wings away so that traffic could flow around the gate as well as through it; they were never carried out. During the war, a decoy replica of the gate was built away from the centre to confuse Allied bombers.
1945–1957: Ruins on Pariser Platz and a Rebuilt Quadriga
By 1945 Pariser Platz, once the grandest square in Berlin, lined with the American and French embassies, the Hotel Adlon and the Academy of Arts, was rubble. The gate was one of the few structures left standing, its columns pocked with bullet and shell holes. Of the original Quadriga, a single horse's head survived; it is now in the Märkisches Museum.
The gate now stood in the Soviet sector, right against the British sector, on what became the line between East and West Berlin. A Soviet flag flew from it. On 17 June 1953, during the East German uprising, three men climbed the gate, tore the Soviet flag down and raised the black-red-gold flag shared at the time by both German states. In 1956 the East Berlin authorities decided to restore the damaged gate, and despite mutual accusations the two halves of the city cooperated: West Berlin's Hermann Noack foundry in Friedenau, working with sculptor Otto Schnitzer, rebuilt the Quadriga from a plaster cast taken in 1942. The restoration was finished on 14 December 1957. On the night of 2–3 August 1958, however, the Quadriga was secretly taken down to the Neuer Marstall and the Prussian eagle and Iron Cross were cut out; East Berlin declared them emblems of Prussian-German militarism.
13 August 1961: The Gate Shut Behind the Wall
Traffic and pedestrians passed freely through the gate until the day after the East German government began building the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. West Berliners gathered on the western side to protest, among them the city's mayor, Willy Brandt. The wall ran just west of the gate, and here it took a special form: a lower but especially massive anti-tank wall rather than the standard concrete slabs. The gate itself sat in the restricted zone, reachable by neither side. Underground, the S-Bahn station that had opened in 1936 as Unter den Linden closed and became one of Berlin's ghost stations.
For visiting leaders the gate became a stage. When John F. Kennedy came in 1963, the Soviets hung large red banners across it so that he could not see into East Berlin. In the 1980s West Berlin mayor Richard von Weizsäcker summed up the division in one line: the German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed. Our history of the Berlin Wall follows the whole barrier, more than 140 kilometres long, around West Berlin.
12 June 1987: Reagan at the Gate
On 12 June 1987 US President Ronald Reagan spoke on a platform in front of the gate on the western side, addressing the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev directly. If Gorbachev sought peace and liberalisation, Reagan said, he should come to this gate and open it; the speech ended with the line for which it is remembered, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Two and a half years later the wall was breached elsewhere in the city on 9 November 1989, and thousands gathered at the gate to celebrate. The gate itself reopened as a border crossing on 22 December 1989, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through to be greeted by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow, cheered by more than 100,000 people. On Christmas Day Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to celebrate the opening, with "Freude" (joy) changed to "Freiheit" (freedom) in the final chorus.
1990 to Today: Reunification and a Rebuilt Pariser Platz
Official reunification celebrations were held at the gate on 2–3 October 1990, and at midnight the black-red-gold flag was raised over it. The Quadriga, badly damaged by revellers who climbed it on New Year's Eve 1989 and by decades of neglect, was taken down for restoration and got its Iron Cross and eagle back. The S-Bahn station reopened on 1 September 1990. A 22-month restoration of the sandstone by the Stiftung Denkmalschutz Berlin cost about €6 million and ended with a ceremonial unveiling on 3 October 2002, together with new lighting by Kardorff Ingenieure.
Pariser Platz was rebuilt under strict rules, with the traditional Berlin eaves height of 22 metres, upright windows and no more than half of each facade in glass. Going anticlockwise from the gate, it is now lined by Haus Sommer, the US Embassy, the Academy of Arts, the rebuilt Hotel Adlon, the French Embassy and Haus Liebermann. Since 2002 the square has been a pedestrian zone, open only to bicycles, taxis and residents' vehicles, and the gate itself has been closed to vehicles again. One block north is the Reichstag, home of the Bundestag; to the south is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
West of the gate, Straße des 17. Juni can hold more than a million people for New Year's Eve fireworks, World Cup screenings and the finish of the Berlin Marathon. In 2009 Angela Merkel walked through the gate with Gorbachev and Lech Wałęsa to mark 20 years since the Wall fell. It is also where Berlin shows solidarity, lit in Ukraine's colours in February 2022. For the city around it, see our guide to Berlin, Germany's capital, where the walk east along Unter den Linden continues to the Humboldt Forum and Berlin Cathedral.