Actually, it was a completely normal city gate, located in the west of the old city of Berlin-Cölln. It was primarily through it that the Great Elector reached his hunting ground, the zoo. It was, so to speak, a royal casket, private property. Only he and his entourage were allowed to hunt there. A small bridle path led there from the castle, initially over a small bridge over a branch of the Spree, called the Dog Bridge. Because that's what the yapping pack of dogs did before the hunt. Later the idea came up to expand the city, which had become cramped in the south and east, to the west. The swamps were drained and large buildings were placed on oak piles in the Brandenburg sand. Two rows of trees were planted at a decent distance to the left and right of the bridle path. As is well known, the resilient linden trees prevailed, otherwise the boulevard would perhaps be called "Unter den Nuts" today... The small gate was replaced by a large, magnificent one. On top, in the years around the French. Revolution, a goddess of peace with a four-horse carriage. After Napoleon's invasion of the city and the ruling family's flight to East Prussia, the peace goddess became a goddess of victory, with oak leaves and a lance. However, after the Allies' victory over Hitler's Germany, the gate completely lost its function; instead of being a passage, there was now an end to traffic for East and West. It was like an island in the middle of the infamous death strip, which lived up to its unfortunate name more than 190 times in Berlin alone. Here it was half wide, the western wall was 1m wide. Next to it was a small staircase with a platform for a tourist view of the walled east. From here, American President Ronald Reagan called out to the Soviet ruler: Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, tear this wall down! And he was right, in the fall of 1989 the wall came down, people danced on it, and the gate, a symbol of the divided city, took on a whole new meaning:

Symbol of the peaceful revolution towards a reunified Germany.