LegendThe return coach
When the chariot came home from Paris, Berliners called it the Retourkutsche, which in German also means a tit-for-tat answer.
Source: Berlin tradition since 1814
The story
In the 1700s Berlin had a wall round it with eighteen gates, where tax was taken on goods coming in. Each was named for the town its road led to. This road went west to Brandenburg. When the king of Prussia wanted a grand entrance to his capital, this is the gate he rebuilt, between 1788 and 1791. The other seventeen are gone.
In China these are the last years of the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The English ambassador Macartney reached his court two years after the gate was finished.
Close by, with a page of its own: Berlin Wall Memorial, East Side Gallery, Acropolis of Athens.
What is here
A gate on a public square. No ticket, no hours, no door.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The gate and the chariot | Free |
| The square on the east side | Free |
| The room of silence | Free; daytime |
| The line of the Wall on the west side | Free |
If you have one minute
On the square, facing the gate
You are on the east side, inside the old city. This is the front. Twelve plain columns stand in two rows of six and make five passages. The middle one is wider. Until 1918 only the royal family could use it.
On top a goddess drives a chariot with four horses, towards you, into the city. She was put up in 1793 as Peace. Look at her staff: a wreath of oak leaves, an iron cross inside it and an eagle on top. Those were added in 1814, and they turned her into Victory.
Now walk through and turn round. A double line of cobblestones crosses the road on the far side. That is where the Wall ran.
Things people often get wrong
"The chariot faces west, towards the enemy." It faces east, into the city, as it always has. The story that the communists turned it round is false.
"The statue is the original." The first one was destroyed in 1945, except for one horse's head, now in a museum. This one was cast in 1958 from plaster moulds taken in 1942. West Berlin made it and East Berlin put it up, in one of the few jobs the two halves ever did together.
"The Wall ran through the gate." It ran in a curve just in front of the west side. The gate stood in the empty strip behind it, guarded, on the eastern side of the line.
"Tear down this wall was said under the gate." Reagan spoke from a platform a hundred metres to the west, with the gate behind him through a sheet of bulletproof glass.
People who stood here
- Carl Gotthard Langhans (architect, 1732–1808)He had never been to Athens. He worked from engravings of the gateway to the Acropolis and gave Berlin its first building in the Greek style.
- Johann Gottfried Schadow (sculptor, 1764–1850)He modelled the chariot group at twenty-nine. It was beaten out of sheets of copper over a wooden frame. He lived long enough to see it taken to Paris and brought home.
- Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor of the French, 1769–1821)He rode in through the gate on 27 October 1806, two weeks after destroying the Prussian army, and had the chariot packed in twelve crates and shipped to Paris. It came back in 1814, when the Prussians reached Paris, and the square was renamed for that.
- Max Liebermann (German painter, 1847–1935)He lived in the house that touches the gate on the north side. From his window on 30 January 1933 he watched the torchlight parade for Hitler pass under it, and said he could not eat as much as he would like to throw up. He was Jewish. His widow killed herself in 1943, on the day she was to be deported.
- Billy Wilder (American film director, born in Austria)He was filming the comedy One, Two, Three in Berlin in August 1961, with a chase that ended in a car driving through the gate into the East. One morning the gate was closed with barbed wire. He finished the scene in Munich, where the studio built him a copy.
- John F. Kennedy (president of the United States)He came to look at the gate on 26 June 1963. The East Germans had hung red cloth between the columns so that he could not see through.
- Ronald Reagan (president of the United States)On 12 June 1987, with the gate at his back, he said: "Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." His own diplomats had tried to cut the line from the speech as too provocative.
- Helmut Kohl and Hans Modrow (the leaders of West and East Germany)On 22 December 1989, in the rain, they walked through the gate from opposite sides and shook hands. A hundred thousand people followed. It had been closed for twenty-eight years.
Go deeper: seven stops round one gate
Everything here is free and open at all hours.
1. The Greek gate
Look at the columns. They are Greek in style, but they stand on bases, which Greek columns of this kind do not have. Above them runs a band of small square reliefs. They show men fighting centaurs. Inside the passages, larger panels show the labours of Hercules. The message is order beating disorder.
The stone is sandstone from the Elbe. It was first painted white, to look like marble.
2. The chariot
Berliners gave the group a nickname when it came back from Paris in 1814: the return coach. The woman who posed for the goddess is said to have been the niece of the coppersmith.
In 1958 East Berlin took the iron cross and the eagle off, as symbols of Prussian war. They were put back in 1991. On the night the year 1990 began, people climbed up to celebrate and broke so much that the whole group had to be taken down and mended.
3. The square
The square was the best address in the city: embassies, a famous hotel, the academy of arts. In 1945 every building on it was a ruin, and under the Wall it was an empty lot. Everything you see round you was built after 1990, most of it to the old outlines.
The house touching the gate on the north side is where the painter Liebermann lived.
4. The room of silence
In the small wing on the north side of the gate is a plain room with benches, a woven hanging and nothing else. Anyone may go in and sit without speaking. It was opened in 1994, and it takes the gate back to its first name.
5. The line in the road
Walk through to the west side and find the double row of cobblestones. Here the Wall was different from anywhere else: only three metres high, but three metres thick, a flat-topped bank that tanks could not push through. That is why, on the night of 9 November 1989, people could climb up and stand on it.
The pictures of that night that went round the world, with hundreds standing on the Wall and the gate lit behind them, were taken from where you are now.
6. The summer of 1961
Until 13 August 1961 cars and buses drove through the gate between the two halves of the city. That Sunday morning it was closed with barbed wire. The next day it was shut "until further notice".
The sign in the photograph says: Attention! You are now leaving West Berlin.
7. The same shot
The same shot: the gate faces east, so the front is lit by the morning sun and is in shadow by afternoon. For the clean picture with nobody in it, stand in the middle of the square before seven in the morning. For the gate glowing against a blue sky, come twenty minutes after sunset.
The underground station beneath the square has the gate's history written on its walls, in the words people said about it.