Native German speaker here and I find the way Zeitgeist is used in English strange sometimes. I feel the word is often used synonymous to fashion or for "things currently popular" in English. A good example is Google's Zeitgeist which gives the popular searches for just one year. This is not something we would call Zeitgeist in German, I think.

In German we would say "Goethe captured the Zeitgeist of his epoch", on the other hand saying "Dark rimmed glass are in the Zeitgeist" would be strange.

To me, zeitgeist (in English) is closer to 'fashionable fad' than 'spirit of the time'. Zeitgeist for me fits "People are using object/service X" better than "migrant crisis in europe is swinging politics to the right". I see zeitgeist used around fads a lot more than I see it around socio-political movements.

Really? To me that sort of is the closest translation, but it doesn't really hit the nail on the head. But maybe that's just my weird linguistic background.

Maybe it's a regional thing? My understanding of how people use it is still ‘spirit of the time’.