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| Barack Obama in Berlin: a history of the Brandenburg Gate | | | Berlin: President Barack Obama will today address the people of Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate, the city’s landmark tourist attraction and the ultimate symbol of power within Germany, and for much of the 20th century, the wider world.Mr Obama will be the third US president to speak at the Gate. In 1987, when the city was still divided, Ronald Reagan chose this spot to urge the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this Wall”. In 1994, five years after the Berlin Wall did come down, Bill Clinton told his delighted audience here that “Berlin is free”. And almost 50 years ago to the day, John F Kennedy made his celebrated “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the nearby West Berlin Schöneberg city hall.
The Brandenburg Gate has always packed a potent message. It was erected between 1788 and 1791 on the instruction of Friedrich Wilhelm II, who was looking for a suitably grand architectural statement to mark the start of the city’s showcase Boulevard Unter den Linden and to signal the growing importance of the Prussian state. The Gate’s neoclassical design was modelled on the entrance to the Athens’ Acropolis and was intended to be a symbol of peace. Within two years it was topped with the Quadriga, a striking sculpture representing the Roman Goddess of Victory.
History has been writ large underneath the Gate’s impressive sandstone arches. In 1806, Napoleon was one of several leaders to have made a triumphant entry to Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate, in his case emphasising the point by removing the Quadriga and taking it to France for several years.
In the early 20th century, Kaiser Wilhelm II used the Gate as a setting for bombastic military displays – a practice taken to even further extremes by Hitler, who staged massive torchlit parades along the Unter den Linden and festooned the Gate’s columns with the Nazi swastika flag.
While much of Berlin was flattened during the war, the Brandenburg Gate escaped relatively unscathed and in 1945 it was the turn of the Soviet liberators of the city to plant their flag alongside what was left of the Quadriga.
But it was in the post-war world that the Gate really came into its own. Bang on the line separating the Soviet and British-controlled sectors of the city, the Gate became the supreme symbol of the divided city – and the divided Cold War world.
The division was accentuated (and made concrete) with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a construction which ran round the back of the Brandenburg Gate effectively sealing it off in the heavily fortified eastern sector of the city.
For years as the East German flag fluttered above the Gate, tourists on the western side were able to climb platforms nearby to peer across to the East, while inhabitants on the other side could only look on at the Gate from afar (there was a second wall on the eastern side preventing anyone getting too close) and imagine what lay beyond.
On November 9, 1989, the Wall was breached and joyous, incredulous crowds danced on the wider section of the Wall surrounding the Brandenburg Gate. The Cold War had ended – peacefully as it turned out – and the Gate was once again transformed, this time into a symbol for a united city.
Today, following substantial renovation, the Brandenburg Gate occupies the prime position at the head of the pedestrianised (and similarly reconstructed) Pariser Platz, a stone’s throw from the Reichtag (complete with glittering Norman Foster-designed dome) and the moving memorial to the victims of the Holocaust consisting of 2,711 concrete slabs. It is by far the city’s most celebrated tourist attraction – and the setting for famously exuberant New Year’s Eve parties. |
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