Brandenburg Gate Informative Speech

The Brandenburg Gate was fully built by August 6, 1791 by a Prussian king named Frederick William II. The Gate was designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans, the Court Superintendent of Buildings, and built between 1788 and 1791, replacing the earlier simple guardhouses which flanked the original gate in the Customs Wall. The gates original name was “The Peace Gate”, it was built as an entry point into the city of Berlin. On top of the gate King Frederick placed the statue of “Quadriga,” the goddess of victory driving a chariot pulled by four horses. The Propylaeum of Athens’ Acropolis is what the gate was modeled on. The statue stayed atop of the gate for over a decade before falling into the clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806. After the 1806 Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Napoleon was the first to use the Brandenburg Gate for a triumphal procession and ordered the dismantlement and the shipment of the statue to France. With the many wars that Napoleon had been fighting the Quadriga was forgotten and the statue remained in a storage for many years. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814 and the Prussian occupation of Paris by General Ernst von Pfuel, the Quadriga was restored to Berlin. The gate …show more content…
President even coming to West Germany he proceeded anyways in the pursuit of freedom for the German people. On June 12th, 1987 President Ronald Reagan made a Rousing speech at the Brandenburg gate to the German People and Mr. Gorbachev who was the last prime minister of the USSR. President Reagans speech was exclaiming that Mr. Gorbachev tear down the Berlin wall and let democracy to East Germany. In 1989 the Brandenburg gate was opened by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and East German Premier Hans Modrow as a border crossing for the East and West Germans to cross through for work and family matter. On November 8th, 1989 the Belin wall fell allowing many family’s that were separated by the wall to be