Brandenburg Gate facelift begins

Berlin's Brandenburg Gate is covered in scaffolding and advertising as renovation begins on the 200-year-old portal

By CNN Berlin Bureau Chief Chris Burns

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- Work crews have begun restoring Germany's leading symbol, the Brandenburg Gate -- a painstaking process that will take more than a year.

All dressed up in advertising -- Deutche Telecom is paying $150,000 a month to fund the project and use the gate as a giant billboard -- the stone portal is undergoing its biggest renovation since postwar reconstruction.

Underneath the banners is a maze of 300 tons of scaffolding. Experts have begun examining every bit of the 200-year-old gate for problems, including cheap patch jobs after World War II that need correcting.

"It's a bit like being a doctor," says architect Reinhard Mueller. "You have to determine first what kind of problems the patient has, and then the restoration workers investigate what needs to be done." As many as 1,000 pieces of stone will be removed, cleaned and restored -- or replaced altogether.

More serious are the widening cracks in the structure, which sways up to about a centimetre -- almost half an inch -- each time a subway train, bus, truck or the occasional techno music parade passes by.

Deep inside the gate, the steel reinforcement will be fortified. Still being hotly debated is whether to paint the gate its original colours -- or leave it as is.

The six-pillared portal was built in 1791 and named after the province in which it was located. It has since been exposed to the elements, pollution, traffic and some of the world's most cataclysmic history.

It wasn't long after it was finished that French Emperor Napoleon I took the Quadriga -- a statue of the winged goddess Victory driving her horse-drawn chariot -- from atop the monument and back to Paris, where he mounted it atop the Arc de Triomphe. Less than a decade later the statue was recaptured and returned to Berlin.

During World War II, Hitler's army marched through the gate, then the Allies bombed it to ruins. The Soviets seized it, and later the East German regime built the Berlin Wall across it. When the Iron Curtain crumbled in the late 1980s, the gate became an emotional and symbolic centre of a nation reunited -- prompting the painstaking effort to save it.

The $3 million project runs mainly on private funding, paid for by the advertising banners on the gate. Although some Berliners grumble about the temporary look, they grin and bear the price to pay to polish the national jewel.

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