Blasphemy

As a long time reader of both, Der Spiegel as well as The Economist, reading the above reviews considering Der Spiegel a German "version" of The Economist made me smile.

Guys, stay serious. This is just not true.

While The Economist provides in-depth analysis of foreign affairs, of political and economical problems all over the world, Der Spiegel focuses on events in Germany as well as events concerning Germany in some way. There is no broad coverage of topics not related to German daily news.

Additionally, the intellectual level of Der Spiegel is much lower than that of The Economist - neither style of language, nor the articles' content can be looked upon as equivalent. Political analysis tends to be superficial (take "Unter der Tarnkappe", ed. 20/2003, which tries to explain the problems of the German government by pointing at the weight problem of the secretary of state, Joschka Fischer) and very biased (eg. during the war in Iraq, the magazine's cover denounced the US as a "bigheaded superpower").

To put it into a nutshell, Der Spiegel is one of Germany's best news magazines - but not due to its qualities, rather because of the fact that its competitors (like "Focus") are even worse. However, calling it a magazine of equal importance as The Economist is just inappropriate, in my humble opinion.

The world's most informative magazine

For those who are fortunate enough to have a working knowledge of German, Der Spiegel presents an astonishingly informative magazine every week. Each issue has over 200 pages, with articles about politics, art, music, architecture, travel, technology, and just about anything else you might want in a weekly magazine. Imagine The Economist at thrice its size, with longer articles, and written in German: that is Der Spiegel.
When I was still learning the language, I found Spiegel rather difficult to understand. This is probably because it's not written for idiots. Still, I learned a lot of colloquial German from reading it. For those who are learning German, and those who speak it well, there is no better source of information than Der Spiegel.

The German "Time"??

Although it usually gets compared to Time Magazine, I actually think it is more akin to The Economist. This is a thick magazine with first quality reporting in German on current events, political and otherwise. To keep tabs on what's going on in German society, this magazine can't be beat.