Brandenburg Gate

The Brandenburg Gate. Well, what to say about the monument, the symbol of Berlin? The Brandenburg Gate was built in 1789 under the name 'Friedenstor', the gate of peace. A somewhat ironic name, as King Frederick the Great, a typical autocrat, achieved that peace by waging wars. By the way, it was his successor, the more enlightened King William Frederick II, who commissioned the construction of this monument. It is the only one of the originally 18 city gates that has been preserved. In 1806, the Prussians were once again at war with the French, losing when Napoleon triumphantly rode through the gate. As a souvenir of this victory, Napoleon took the sculpture that stands on top to Paris: the famous 'Quadriga', the chariot drawn by a team of four horses, driven by Victoria, whom we already know from the Siegessäule.
In 1814, the Prussians, in turn, were victorious in Paris, and the chariot retraced its route in reverse. In Berlin, new decorations and symbols were added; a staff, an iron cross, and an eagle. The group of statues was irreparably damaged in the war. With the preserved molds, a new casting was made and given to the East Germans, who immediately removed the additions that they found loathsome and abject, not politically correct, we should say. During the festivities marking the opening of the wall in 1998, the already troubled statue was damaged again; the restoration that followed allowed for the reattachment of what had originally been removed.
There is quite an amusing urban legend in Berlin about this group of statues, which still appears in various travel guides. This legend claims that when the Brandenburg Gate stood on East Berlin territory in 1945, the communists turned the sculpture that originally faced east - after all, the east was once the place of danger to be feared; the Tsar - around; the capitalist enemy resides in the west, that is where the chariot should go. However, all possible photographs from the past decades of the artwork invariably show a quadriga facing east.

Toineke