Brandenburg Gate existence of two German states and two Berlins, West Berlin mayor Richard von Weizsäcker said: "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed." On 12 June 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke to the West Berlin populace at the Brandenburg Gate, demanding the razing of the Berlin Wall. Addressing the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan said, On 25 December 1989, less than two months after the Berlin Wall began to come down, the conductor Leonard Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a version of the Ninth Symphony
Brandenburg Gate (Kaliningrad) hundred years later the gate was torn down and replaced by a brick structure by order of King Frederick II of Prussia. During restoration work in 1843 the gate was significantly altered and decorated with sharp decorative pediments, cruciform sandstone color, stylized leaves on the tops, coats of arms and medallions. Sculptures of Field Marshal Hermann von Boyen (1771–1848), a war minister and reformer of the Prussian army, and Lieutenant-General Ernst von Aster (1778–1855), chief of the engineering corps, and one of the initiators of the second strengthening of the city walls, were added as well. The Brandenburg Gate is