Brandenburg Gate

Frederick William II of Prussia, determined to give his capital the monuments Vienna, Paris and London already had, commissioned the royal architect Carl Gotthard Langhans to design a new gate on the site of an existing crossing through the Berlin Customs Wall, modelled on the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens. Called the "Friedenstor" (Peace Gate), it was unceremoniously opened to traffic in August 1791 before construction was complete, marking a Prussian military intervention in the Netherlands that had restored the Dutch king, Frederick William's brother-in-law, to power. The bronze quadriga by the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow was not raised into place until 1793; Prussian payment records from the time name the goddess driving it Victoria from the outset; a widely repeated alternative account holds she was first intended as Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, and only later reinterpreted as Victory, but German art historians say that reading is not attested in the contemporary record.

After Prussia's defeat at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, Napoleon became the first to stage a triumphal procession through the gate and had the quadriga carried off to Paris. It was restored to Berlin in 1814 after Napoleon's defeat and the Prussian occupation of Paris under General Ernst von Pfuel, and redesigned by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for the gate's new role as a Prussian triumphal arch, the goddess now given the Prussian eagle and an Iron Cross on her lance. In gratitude to Pfuel, the Kaiser granted his family, alongside the royal family, the sole right to pass through the central archway, a privilege that lasted from 1814 to 1919.

Weathering forced a renovation from 1913 that the First World War interrupted; it was not finished until 1926, and also had to repair damage the gate suffered when government troops used it as a firing position during the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and the Kapp Putsch of March 1920.

Under National Socialism the gate was used as a party symbol and set on the east–west axis of Berlin's planned rebuilding as "world capital Germania"; a seven-kilometre stretch of the axis running from the gate opened in 1939. The gate survived the Second World War and was still standing, though badly damaged by bullets and nearby explosions, among the ruins of the Pariser Platz in 1945; one horse's head from the original quadriga survived and is now held by the Märkisches Museum.

After Germany's surrender the gate stood in the Soviet occupation zone, next to the British sector, on what became the border between East and West Berlin, with a Soviet flag flying above it. On 17 June 1953, during the East German uprising, three men scaled the gate and tore down the Soviet flag; one of them, Wolfgang Panzer, went missing soon afterwards and likely paid for the act with his life. East and West Berlin collaborated on restoring the war-damaged gate, the only Berlin city gate to survive, completing the work on 14 December 1957.

Construction of the Berlin Wall from 13 August 1961 closed the gate to traffic for almost three decades; West Berliners, including mayor Willy Brandt, gathered on its western side the following day to protest. On 12 June 1987, President Ronald Reagan addressed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from the western side of the gate, demanding: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

The Brandenburg Gate border crossing reopened on 22 December 1989, when West German chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through to be greeted by East German prime minister Hans Modrow; the quadriga was removed for renovation the following year, and Germany was officially reunified in October 1990. Privately refurbished at a cost of €6 million, the gate reopened on 3 October 2002, the 12th anniversary of reunification. On 9 November 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel walked through it with Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland's Lech Wałęsa to mark 20 years since the Wall's fall.

On 17 September 2023, climate activists from the Last Generation group sprayed the gate's columns orange with fire extinguishers; fourteen people were detained, and Berlin's mayor Kai Wegner condemned the act. The gate, owned by the city of Berlin and protected as an architectural heritage monument, is now closed to traffic and is usually the finish line of the Berlin Marathon.