If you are looking at British War films there are plenty of sources, such as the Times Online, however where do you turn for German sources when you are stuck behind a PC in the UK or the States? Obviously the best thing would be to jump on a plane and go to the archives in Berlin, but that's not always possible.
I have now found at least 3 sources of contemporary film reviews, in German, that can be accessed from the net.
Der Spiegel
The first is the German magazine der Spiegel. It has been commenting on the West German and German film scene since Jan 1947 and its whole archive is on line. It is easy to search and the articles are easy to find.
There is no need to log on and no need to register. You can read the article on line and also download a pdf of the page it comes from. This is massively interesting, not only for the article itself but also what is being advertised and the articles around it.
Der Spiegel's archive can be found at: http://www.spiegel.de/suche/
Die Zeit
This paper's archive also stretches back in to the Occupation period and again its archive is simple to navigate.
There is no need to log on or register, however you can only read the html version of the article. It appears that the articles have been scanned and the scanning is not very good as the text often jumbles words or adds spelling mistakes which can render the text illedgible.
The articles are down loadable however the pdfs are just in plain text and it is not possible to see the Ur Text, which would help the researche to get over the spelling issues and jumbling issues.
DDR Press
It has been pointed out to me that I rely very heavily on West German texts for the reviews that I use, which is a little strange given that I am trying to employ a cross German approach. This has been due to the fact that I haven't been able to find a good source of East German and SBZ newspapers on line. That is until now.
I recommend the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin which has a searchable archive of Neues Deutschland which goes back to 1946 it also hopes to have an archive of the Berliner Zeitung [BZ] Neue Zeit [NZ] going back to 1945 online shortly.
I have found the archive a little difficult to navigate however it seems to be a fantastic resource that all researchers can use. You have to register and this takes a moment or two, but once you are there everything you wanted to ask Neues Deutschland but were afraid to ask is available.
It can be found here http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ddr-presse/?oid_auth=confirm
The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin allows users to see the article in html format, but also to download the page of the newspaper in pdf format. So in this sense it is comparible to Der Spiegel.
It also has a number of other regional pre World War II papers digitised and they can be found here: http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/list/
