Open the Gate!

Photographic approaches to the Brandenburg Gate

There’s hardly a structure in Berlin that’s been made the showcase of political presentations as often as the Brandenburg Gate. Originally built as a city gate by Carl Gotthard Langhans, it formed the prestigious conclusion to the palace axis. Napoleon rode through it in his victory parade. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Prussian ruling house held their military and victory parades here. The National Socialists abused the structure for their propaganda. During the Cold War, its location on the boundary between the East and West Germany and its monumental beauty made the Brandenburg Gate a political symbol for the division of the country and the world. After the Berlin Wall was built, visiting the Gate figured into state visits on both sides of the city. Following Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum, “Open the Gate!” was the name of the campaign of the West German Kuratorium Unteilbares Deutschland (Indivisible Germany) since 1958. More recently, the German Reunification in 1990 once again turned the Gate into a national icon. Today, the Brandenburg Gate is a symbol for German unity and one of Berlin’s most frequently photographed landmarks.