The Brandenburg Gate was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia and completed in 1791, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the neoclassical style of Athens’s Propylaea as a symbol of peace. Napoleon’s troops carried off its Quadriga statue as a trophy in 1806, and it was restored to Berlin after his defeat in 1814. During the Cold War the gate stood stranded in the no-man’s-land alongside the Berlin Wall, before becoming the symbolic site of German reunification when 100,000 people gathered here for its reopening on December 22, 1989.
Today it anchors Pariser Platz in the Mitte district, within easy walking distance of the Reichstag building and its glass dome, the Berlin Wall Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie, and the museums of Museum Island. The gate itself is a free, open-air monument that can be visited and photographed at any hour.
Sunrise and dusk bring the most dramatic light for photos, since the gate faces directly east-west, while after dark it’s beautifully illuminated and noticeably quieter than during the day.