Brandenburg Gate

Brandenburg Gate (German, Brandenburger Tor), an 18th-century city gateway in the historic center of the German capital, Berlin. Named after the province in which Berlin is located, the Brandenburg Gate was built between 1788 and 1791 in a neoclassical style (see Neoclassical Art and Architecture). It was designed by German architect Carl Gotthard von Langhans, who modeled it on the Propylaea, the ceremonial entrance to the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. German sculptor Gottfried Schadow decorated the gate with a number of reliefs and with the Quadriga, a statue of Victory as a winged woman driving a chariot drawn by four horses, which was placed on the monument's flat top in 1794. In 1806 French Emperor Napoleon I stole the Quadriga to have it mounted atop the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but in 1814 the statue was recaptured and returned to Berlin.

The Brandenburg Gate is located on Pariser Platz, a square at the western end of the avenue Unter den Linden, and is therefore near several public buildings and foreign embassies. Throughout its history, it has often been a rallying place for ceremonies, parades, and demonstrations, as well as the site of battles between soldiers and revolutionary fighters in 1848 and again in 1919. At the end of World War II (1939-1945), after Berlin was partitioned into four sectors of Allied occupation, the Brandenburg Gate became part of the Soviet-occupied sector. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to separate East and West Berlin, the gate was sealed off in the stretch of land between the two sections of the divided city. Following the collapse of the communist regime in East Berlin in November 1989, the Berlin Wall was dismantled and public access to the Brandenburg Gate was restored.