Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

The Brandenburg Gate was inaccessible for 28 years. It stood precisely on the border between East and West Berlin, and neither side could approach it: the Wall ran directly beside it on the east, and the death strip between the Wall and East Berlin proper made the immediate area a killing zone. For nearly three decades, the gate – built in 1791 as a symbol of Prussian power and named after the city of Brandenburg, which lay to the west – stood in a no-man’s land that neither Germany could use.

On November 9, 1989, the Wall fell. On December 22, 1989, the Brandenburg Gate officially opened. The scale of what that represented – a building that had sat sealed in a death strip for 28 years suddenly accessible from both sides – is the thing that gives the gate its specific weight. It’s not just a neoclassical arch. It’s a concrete record of a geopolitical situation that seems, in retrospect, difficult to believe actually existed.

The Gate

The Brandenburg Gate stands at Pariser Platz, at the western end of Unter den Linden. The Quadriga sculpture on top (a chariot with the goddess of victory, restored after damage in the Second World War and subsequently repaired after the reunification period) is the gate’s defining visual element. The gate itself has two main passages and is free to walk through at any hour.

The Pariser Platz around it contains the US Embassy, the Hotel Adlon (which reopened in 1997 on the site of the famous original, destroyed in 1945), and several other embassies and institutions. The square was bombed flat in the war, sat undeveloped in the death strip, and has been substantially rebuilt since reunification.

Context

The Holocaust Memorial (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) is immediately southeast of the gate: 2,711 concrete stelae across a city block. The Topography of Terror museum on Niederkirchnerstrasse (10-15 minutes’ walk) sits on the former site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters and provides the most comprehensive documentation of the Nazi terror apparatus of any museum in the city. Both are free; both are essential for understanding what Berlin is carrying.

The Reichstag is immediately north of the gate and can be visited with advance booking (free, through the Bundestag website). The glass dome by Norman Foster, symbolically transparent above the chamber, gives views over the Tiergarten and the city. The dome is specifically worth doing; the building’s history is the reason.

Getting There

Brandenburger Tor S-Bahn and U-Bahn station is directly adjacent. By foot from the Potsdamer Platz station it’s 10 minutes. By foot from Friedrichstrasse it’s 15 minutes. Walking between these three points along Unter den Linden gives you most of the major Cold War history sites of central Berlin.