Frequently Asked Questions

The German Newspaper Portal contains digitised historical newspapers from German cultural heritage institutions, which our data partners - mostly libraries - make available to the German Digital Library.

Our partners decide whether and which newspapers or issues are made available and also whether and which holdings are available as full text, so that the holdings available in the German Newspaper Portal are not a representative selection of German newspaper history. 

Our partners are continually making new newspaper collections available so that the number of newspapers in the German Newspaper Portal is constantly growing. A current alphabetical list of the titles contained in the German Newspaper Portal can be found here.

The objective of the German Newspaper Portal is to bring together all the holdings of digitised historical newspapers in German cultural heritage institutions - mostly libraries and archives - in one portal and make them searchable. This is a process that will take many years. Our partners are continuously making digitised newspapers available so that the content in the German Newspaper Portal is constantly growing.

There may be various reasons for this. For example, the majority of historical newspapers have not yet been digitised. Digitisation is the responsibility of our partners, the cultural heritage institutions, and it is a complex and resource-intensive process. Some digitised newspapers cannot be displayed in the German Newspaper Portal for legal reasons, others do not meet the minimum technical standards. It is also possible that the newspaper belongs to the holdings of an institution that is not yet involved in the German Newspaper Portal.

The German Newspaper Portal is a ‘subportal’ of the German Digital Library (DDB), which only contains newspapers and offers genre-specific searches and object displays. All newspapers can also be found in the German Digital Library. But only in the newspaper portal can you search in newspapers (so-called full-text search); it is only here that you can browse entry points according to the title, place and date of a newspaper and only here are full texts accessible, if our data partners have made these available.

In the German Newspaper Portal you can search in and for historical newspapers.

Search in historical newspapers

Approximately 90% of all issues in the German Newspaper Portal have full texts. The full texts can be searched via the search slot on the homepage or in the header. You can also search individual newspapers or individual issues of a newspaper using the full text search.

Search for historical newspapers

Using the boxes ‘Select newspaper by title’, ‘Select newspaper by place’, ‘Select newspaper by year of publication’ on the main page, you can find all newspapers available in the German Newspaper Portal by their title, their place of distribution or their publication date.

Phrase search

A phrase search allows you to search for words in close proximity by combining individual words into a phrase using inverted commas.

While a search for Schillermuseum Weimar, for example, returns all those issues in which the words Schillermuseum and Weimar appear in any position (e.g. ... the Schillermuseum in Weimar ... City of Weimar and the Schillermuseum ...), a phrase search for "Schillermuseum Weimar" restricts the result to outputs in which the words Schillermuseum and Weimar occur in exact succession.

A combination of phrase search and wildcard search is supported; a search for "Schillermuseum Weimar" Goethe? will return hits containing both the phrase and the term searched for using wildcards. The use of wildcards within a phrase search is not supported.

A phrase search is only possible with at least two terms. It is currently not possible to narrow down the search to just one search term, e.g. "Schillers".

 

Distance search

Another way of limiting the sometimes very high number of hits is the distance search. You can specify the maximum number of words that may be between two search words in the form "Search term search term"~number of words.

By entering "Schillermuseum Weimar"~17, there must be no more than 17 words between the words "Schillermuseum" and "Weimar" (but there may be less than 17). The order in which "Schillermuseum" and "Weimar" occur is not taken into account, so occurrences of "Weimar"... "Schillermuseum" are also found. The minimum distance that can be searched for is one word.

Wildcard search 

In the full-text search, you can use the question mark ? and asterisk * wildcards for certain characters in search terms. The question mark stands for a single character. The asterisk stands for any number of characters. Letters and numbers count as characters.

You typically use wildcards if a term has several spellings or can also occur as part of a word.

Enter Schmi* to find the names Schmidt and Schmitt.

If you enter Schiller*museum, you will find Schiller Museum, Schiller National Museum, Schiller Museum, etc.

Enter Me?er to find the names Meyer and Meier.

Wildcards can be placed at the end or anywhere within the search term.

Note: Wildcards cannot be placed at the beginning of a word.

 

Boolean operators

Searching with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) is currently not possible.

The central search slot on the homepage or in the header allows you to search for newspapers with a specific publication date or publication year. Search queries must be in the form DD.MM.YYYY or YYYY. You can also combine the date search with ‘normal’ search terms. For example, a search for "Berliner Tageblatt 04.01.1910" will return the corresponding newspaper edition as the first hit. A search for "Bismarck 1890" returns all issues from 1890 in which Bismarck was mentioned.

To display the complete contents of the German Newspaper Portal, enter the asterisk * in the search slot and press Enter. Alternatively, you can leave the search slot empty and press Enter.

The search results are displayed in random order. You can scroll through the search results and narrow them down using the filters.

When searching in the newspaper portal, lemmatisation is used for nouns and proper names. Lemmatisation is the reduction of a word to its basic form, the so-called lemma. For the search in the newspaper portal, this means that a search for "Schillers" will also find "Schiller". So it doesn't matter whether you enter "Schiller" or "Schillers" in the search slot, you will get the same results in both cases. Currently, lemmatisation is also used in the phrase search, i.e. it does not matter whether you search for "Schiller National Museum" or "Schillers National Museum". You can find out more about lemmatisation at Wikipedia, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology).

The German Newspaper Portal brings together digitised newspaper collections from various cultural heritage institutions. Our partners are responsible for digitising the newspapers, i.e. scanning and capturing the full texts. Different software and standards are used in the process. The resulting scans and full texts are transferred to the German Newspaper Portal without any changes, so that the newspaper portal contains full texts of varying quality.

The time of origin of the full texts can also play a role: There have been major technical improvements in recent years, meaning that full texts created during more recent digitisation projects are often of significantly better quality than older full texts.

All newspaper issues found in the Deutsches Zeitungsportal are provided with a licence or a legal status information, which stipulate how users may use the newspaper issues. For individual newspaper pages the same licences or legal status information apply as for the complete newspaper issues.

Individual pages, individual issues and the related full texts can be downloaded via the download function – it is our data partners that decide which of these download options are available.

Yes, users can access images, full texts and metadata via an API (Application Programming Interface). The API of the German Digital Library is documented with an OpenAPI specification.

You can find an interactive representation here. If you open the tab for /search/index/{indexname}/{requesthandler}, you will see the two Solr search indices „newspaper“ and „newspaper-issues“. The „newspaper“ search index provides information on the newspapers in the newspaper portal, while the „newspaper-issues“ search index provides information on the issues available in the newspaper portal. You can run queries directly on this website and view the results. The Solr schemas for the field names of the search indices are also linked in the API documentation. The small library ddbapi which is available on PyPI (source code) provides a wrapper for using the API with the programming language Python.

 

With a user account, you can create, describe and download favourite lists.

Creating a user account is free, all you need is a valid e-mail address. To create an account, please click on the person icon in the header and on ‘Create user account’ in the dialogue box that opens. The user account is valid for both the German Newspaper Portal and the German Digital Library. If you already have an account with the German Digital Library, you can also use it to log in to the newspaper portal.

Once you have created a user account, you can save newspaper pages in one or more favourites lists and add descriptions. You can save 100 newspaper pages per favourites list. Favourites lists can be shared and downloaded. Favourites lists that you have saved in the German Newspaper Portal cannot be accessed via the German Digital Library and vice versa.

The German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) lists newspapers and journals that can be found in German and Austrian libraries and archives. It assigns identifiers (ZDB IDs) that make each newspaper or journal uniquely and permanently identifiable. The German Newspaper Portal uses these identifiers to uniquely identify the newspapers. In addition, further metadata of a newspaper, such as publication history and publication frequency, are taken from the ZDB via the ZDB ID and displayed in the newspaper portal.

If a newspaper listed in the ZDB is available in the German Newspaper Portal, there is also a link from the corresponding ZDB entry to the associated newspaper portal holdings.

Currently, only libraries or institutions that can provide their metadata in METS/MODS format can deliver holdings to the German Newspaper Portal. More detailed information and contact details can be found here (information available in German only). We are currently examining how other institutions, e.g. archives and museums, can also participate in the German Newspaper Portal with their newspaper holdings.

The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata provides further information, e.g. on the background of the German Newspaper Portal, on the composition and quality of the content as well as on the backend architecture and metadata schema. The DFG proposals and thus the work programme for the first and second development phases are available here.

The newspaper portal includes newspapers published between 1933 and 1945, in the years of National Socialist rule, and newspapers which were issued by National Socialist party and state organisations. Making these newspapers accessible serves purposes of civic education, of communicating knowledge as well as the transparent reappraisal of the NS dictatorship.

The German Newspaper Portal expressly distances itself from all racist, antisemitic and other discriminatory content as well as from propagandistic presentations and those glorifying violence contained in these newspapers. Before you open a newspaper issue which was published between 1933 and 1945 and/or which was issued by a Nationalist Socialist party and state organisation, a pop-up window will appear which points out these connections and which must be actively confirmed by you before the newspaper issue will be shown. For further contextualisation, the German Digital Library has created a virtual exhibition on the topic “Presse in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus” (“The Press during the National Socialist Era“) (available in German only).

In principle, you can use any browser. However, some Firefox versions cause errors when opening newspaper issues. If this is the case for you, we recommend using the German Newspaper Portal with the Chrome or Edge browsers.