Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten and Reichstag: Three Places Every Regime Re-Read

The Gate, the Tiergarten and the Reichstag were each built for one purpose and re-read by every regime that held Berlin. The Brandenburg Gate began as an opening in a tax wall, was opened as a gate of peace, and became a victory arch, a stage for marching columns and a frontier. The Tiergarten was a royal hunting wood, then a public park, then a field of stumps and vegetables, and now it holds the memorials to people the Nazis persecuted and murdered. The Reichstag was crowned with a dome, burned, wrecked, stripped, wrapped in fabric and crowned again in glass. Roamer's walk joins the three in a loop of ten stops over about 2.9 kilometers, and the pattern repeats at every one.

A gate in a tax wall

Pariser Platz, where the walk begins, was laid out in 1734 as the Quarré, a square at the end of Unter den Linden inside a new excise wall, the line where goods paid duty on their way into the city. It took its present name after the Prussian entry into Paris in 1814. The Gate itself came later. Carl Gotthard Langhans built it from 1788 to 1791 for King Frederick William the Second, modeled on the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, with six Doric columns on each face and five passages. Its side buildings were a guardhouse and a tax house: the grandest customs post in Berlin.

Then every owner of the city found a new use for it. The quadriga on top was carried off to Paris in 1806 and brought back in 1814, now with Karl Friedrich Schinkel's iron cross and eagle on the goddess's standard. East Berlin sawed the cross and eagle off in 1958. From 13 August 1961 until 22 December 1989 the Wall closed the Gate entirely. The cross and eagle went back in the restoration of 1992. The full story of the Gate as frontier is in our piece on the Brandenburg Gate and the Wall.

A wood that kept changing hands

Step through the Gate and you are in the Tiergarten, and the park is the quiet center of this walk. Its Floraplatz clearing goes back to Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff's baroque design, and Berlin's heritage office counts it, with the goldfish pond beside it, among the surviving pieces of that late-baroque layout. Between 1880 and 1910 citizens' committees set up a gallery of monuments to poets and composers in the park. The walk passes Rudolf Siemering's monument to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, about ten meters of marble portraits under a gilded dome, which Berliners mocked as the musicians' stove.

At the Floraplatz stand eight life-size bronze animals that Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had cast after Siemering's plaster models for the George Washington Monument in Philadelphia. After 1945 the felled park was used to grow vegetables, and the bull and the bear were lost. In 2019 and 2020 they were recast from 3D scans of the Philadelphia originals, and all eight went back in June 2020, on foundations archaeologists found still in the ground.

The same ground then took on a new role, as the site of national memorials. The memorial to homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism, by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, opened in 2008 as a single concrete block with a window showing a film. The memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe, by Dani Karavan, opened in 2012: a round pool lined in dark steel that mirrors the trees, with a stone in the middle that sinks every day and returns with a fresh flower. And on the axis of the old Siegesallee, cleared in 1938 and 1939 for a Nazi parade route, stands the Soviet War Memorial of 1945, where about 2,500 Red Army soldiers are buried, according to the heritage office. One park now holds a royal garden, a citizens' gallery of composers, a Soviet cemetery and the memorials to the persecuted.

A parliament crowned twice

The Reichstag, by Paul Wallot, was completed in 1894 with a dome of iron and glass. Its portal waited until December 1916 for the words Dem Deutschen Volke, To the German People, cast in bronze letters by the Jewish family foundry S. A. Loevy. The building burned in February 1933. Wallot's damaged dome was blown up in 1954, and Paul Baumgarten rebuilt the building in the 1960s without one, stripping much of the ornament. Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped it in the summer of 1995. Then Norman Foster rebuilt it from 1995 to 1999 and crowned it with a glass dome 23 meters high and 40 meters wide, with a mirrored funnel that lights the chamber below. The building's whole biography is in our piece on the Reichstag in glass.

The walk ends at the White Crosses on the Spree, set up by a citizens' association in 1971, a few steps from where the Wall ran behind the parliament. From there the river itself was the border.

Walking it

The loop is level, with a few short flights of steps, and ends a few minutes from where it began. Do it at your own pace: the memorials in the park reward a pause, and the stops are short enough to skip or linger as you like.

The walk is Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag: A Gate, a Park, a Parliament, ten stops from Pariser Platz to the White Crosses. See every route on the Berlin page.

Sources

• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Brandenburger Tor (09065019): Langhans, 1788 to 1791, the Propylaea model, the tax wall and the guard and tax houses.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Reichstagsgebäude (09050341): Wallot's building of 1884 to 1894, the Behrens letters of 1916, the dome blown up in 1954, the rebuildings by Baumgarten and Foster.
• Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe: Dani Karavan's pool and the sinking stone, opened 2012.
• Bezirksamt Mitte, press release on the Floraplatz animals (2020): the recast bull and bear and the re-erection of the eight animals.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, press release on the restored Floraplatz (2023): the Floraplatz layout, the Siemering animals as copies of the Philadelphia figures, the war damage.