Brandenburg Gate
The gate was built to terminate the boulevard Unter den Linden, modelled on the Propylaea of the Acropolis. It has twelve Doric columns, six on each side, and is crowned by a quadriga. The gate has followed the course of German history: from Napoleon’s triumphal march to the Wall and reunification.
The Prussian king Frederick William II commissioned the gate as a new monumental termination of Unter den Linden, at the point where the road to the town of Brandenburg left Berlin. Carl Gotthard Langhans designed it, and it was built in 1788–1791. It was one of the first buildings in Germany to take an explicitly Greek model; Langhans based it on the Propylaea of the Acropolis, the gateway to the temples of Athens. The gate is built of sandstone. The quadriga on top, a goddess of victory driving a chariot drawn by four horses, was designed by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow and executed in sheet copper beaten over a mould. It was installed in 1793 and originally represented the goddess of peace.
The gate has five passages between Doric columns, six on each side. The central and widest was reserved for the royal family. The columns are fluted and have bases, unlike Greek Doric columns, so the order is a free interpretation of antiquity. Above the columns runs a frieze with triglyphs and metopes, and then an attic with a relief showing a triumphal procession. The passages contain reliefs with scenes from the life of Hercules. On either side are two lower buildings that once served as a customs house and a guardhouse. The gate’s simple, clear form made it a symbol from the very beginning: it signalled that Prussia wished to see itself as a new Athens.
In 1806 Napoleon had the quadriga carried off to Paris as war booty. It was recovered in 1814, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel then gave the goddess’s staff an Iron Cross and a Prussian eagle. The gate thereafter became the setting for parades and national demonstrations, including the Nazi torchlight procession of 1933. During the Second World War it was badly damaged and the quadriga almost completely destroyed; it was recreated in 1958. When the Wall was built in 1961 the gate ended up in no man’s land, and it became the symbol of divided Germany. When it was opened in December 1989 it became instead the symbol of reunification. The gate was restored in the early 2000s. It shows how the same building can take on entirely different meanings through history, and it now appears on German euro coins.