Search German newspaper pages in the Deutsches Zeitungsportal.

Covers ~33.8M digitised pages, densest between 1850 and 1949. Results are individual newspaper pages, and each carries highlighted snippets showing where the query matched, with matched terms in {braces} - so a single search is usually enough to judge a hit without downloading anything.

Args: query: Solr query over page OCR text. Supports: - Exact phrases: '"Bert Reese"' - Boolean operators: 'Hellseher AND Telepathie', 'A OR B', 'A NOT B' - Wildcards: 'Hellseh*' - Fuzziness for OCR damage: 'Hanussen~1' - Proximity: '"Hellseher Hanussen"~10' page: Result page number, 1-indexed rows: Results per page (max 100) from_year: Earliest publication year, inclusive to_year: Latest publication year, inclusive paper_title: Restrict to one newspaper title place: Restrict to a place of distribution language: Language code, ISO 639-2 (e.g. 'ger')

Returns: total_results (a true count, not a ranking depth), total_pages, and the matching pages with their metadata, viewer URL and snippets. Results are ordered by relevance; DDB cannot order by date, so chronological work means bounding the query with from_year/to_year and sweeping it whole.

Find where a query appears inside one page or one whole issue.

Args: identifier: A page id ('ITEMID-pagename') or an issue item id ('ITEMID') query: Solr query over page OCR text

Returns: The matching pages, with snippets showing the terms in {braces}.

Download the OCR text of a page, or of every page of an issue.

Args: identifier: A page id ('ITEMID-pagename') or an issue item id ('ITEMID') refresh: Ignore any cached copy and fetch again

Returns: Path to the cached text file. Files run to tens of kilobytes per page, so read slices of them rather than the whole thing.