the scissor sister

After 55 years, 'human Google' Edda Tasiemka is selling her amazing cuttings library and retiring - distressing news for at least one customer

Lynn Barber
Sunday March 13, 2005
The Observer

The news that Edda Tasiemka is planning to retire and sell her cuttings library had many journalists, including me, sobbing into our laptops. How could any of us survive without Edda and her cuttings? Whizzy management types are fond of telling us that nowadays you can find everything on the internet, but actually it is rare to find any newspaper stories over five years old or any magazine articles at all, whereas one quick phone call to an elderly German widow in the suburbs can provide precisely what you need. Almost every profile writer and biographer I know uses Tasiemka, and everyone who uses her raves about her. Nicholas Coleridge is such a devotee that he put her in one of his novels. Robert Lacey said he could never have written Majesty without her and added wistfully: 'She's a real dish, isn't she? I wish I was an older man!'

Given that Mrs Tasiemka is 82, this is quite a wish. But it is impossible to believe that she is 82, when she looks about 40 - a tiny, darting, elfin figure who makes most ballet dancers seem clunky. Her Christmas card a couple of years ago showed her sitting on Santa Claus's lap, flashing her fabulous legs in slinky black nylons. The other day, she was telling me that she and her 'toyboy', Peter Knight, were going to a dinner-dance at the Compleat Angler and that she planned to wear her La Perla nightdress because it was far too glamorous to confine to the bedroom.

She and Peter love dancing. 'Strictly ballroom?' I asked and she said sternly: 'No. Smoochy dancing.'

Incidentally, Peter the toyboy is 78 - they have been lovers for 34 years.

So Mrs Tasiemka is not exactly your average librarian. Nor does her house look remotely like a library. It is a conventional 1920s semi-detached in north London, with a white Sandtex exterior, a short drive up to the side garage and a lawn surrounded by bedding plants. The drawing-room gives the same impression of old-fashioned gemütlich comfort - button-back armchairs, Regency cabinets and highly polished tables covered with knick-knacks.

However, if you look carefully there are already signs that this is not quite a conventional house - the Stop the War placard in the hall for instance (Mrs Tasiemka went on both the prewar marches) or the two lifesize model sheep in the corner.

But it is when Mrs Tasiemka starts opening drawers and cupboards and sliding back bookshelves to reveal other shelves behind that you really begin to see what the house is about. 'Are you interested in American history?' she asks, going to a Regency music cabinet and opening the drawers. 'This is the American Civil War,' she says, pulling out a sheaf of American newspapers from the l860s. 'This is the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.'

In the drawing-room, the cuttings files are kept more at less at bay, but they run riot over the rest of the house - sport in the loo, medicine in the kitchen, crime and celebrities in the top bedroom, and then - aagh! - the terrifying section she calls 'the Family', housed in the garage. Of course, there is no car in the garage, just hundreds and hundreds of buff folders with titles like 'My Father Stole My Husband', 'Seven-Year Itch', 'Runaway Mothers-in-Law' - meat and drink to daytime television shows such as Trisha.

It is an idiosyncratic filing system but it seems to work. In fact, it works far more quickly and efficiently than any other library I know. Mrs Tasiemka has a staff of three to help with the photocopying, but she does all the filing herself and works pretty well non-stop. And she seems to remember everything .

If I say: 'Can I have cuts on so-and-so?' she'll often volunteer: 'And do you want something on the brother who committed suicide?', even though I don't even know that there was a brother who committed suicide. As Robert Lacey attests: 'Mrs Tasiemka was a Google search engine long before Google was invented.' But, of course, that compliment would mean nothing to her because she has never used the internet.

She has had a strange, disrupted life. She was born in Germany in 1922. Her parents were unmarried. Her father was a famous communist leader, but he was forced into exile when she was a baby, so she was brought up by her mother in a small dormitory village outside Ham burg. 'In l933, when the Nazis took power, I was immediately aware of what was going on. We had the police in practically every week; a lot of our friends were arrested and worse. Because of that, I never wanted to join the Hitler Youth.'

This meant that she was not allowed to go to the local secondary school, so they moved into Hamburg. But then, on New Year's Eve 1938, her mother was arrested. 'The police came at midnight and took my mother away; the next day, they sealed the flat, so I had nowhere to live. I was l5. And I sort of moved around then, staying with friends, but the first people who took me in were Jews, so that was dangerous, too.'

Her mother was released after six months but they still had nowhere to live; they eventually ended up living in a fishing hut by a lake.

Edda's dream was to be a civil engineer, and she trained as a technical draughtswoman, but she ended up after the war as a secretary with the British army of occupation in Hamburg. It was there in l949 that she met Hans Tasiemka, who was also working for the British army, as an interpreter at the War Crimes Trials Centre. He was a left-wing Jewish journalist who had fled to Paris at the outbreak of war and joined the Foreign Legion. Eventually, he escaped via Casablanca and joined the British army.

He was 17 years older than Edda, but she says: 'We were politically on the same level totally, and he knew a lot.' When he was demobbed at the end of l949, they moved to England and got married in Hampstead register office. Peter Lorre, who was a friend of Hans's from prewar Berlin, gave them lunch at the Dorchester on their wedding day, and Mrs Lorre gave Edda some camiknickers. They lived in a tiny bedsit off the Finchley Road. Hans worked for the German section of the Foreign Office, producing a magazine for distribution in Germany, and she was a typist for Universal Aunts. Was her English good? 'Oh, better than now. Because I worked for the army for four years and all day long, I spoke English and took dictation from my Major Holt.'

The Tasiemkas never had children ('For years, I went up and down Harley Street but I had blocked tubes and that was that') but they always had cuttings. Edda remembers that when she first met her husband, his pockets were already bulging with newspaper clippings, which he sent to a friend in London to store. 'So, when we got here, he had a box of cuttings and that was the start. In the bedsit, we kept them under the bed. Later on, of course, it got completely out of hand.'

Hans was working for various German newspapers; one day, he was away when a Munich paper rang demanding a report of the opening of Parliament, so Edda wrote it and phoned it through. 'That was my very first story and I thought, "Oh dear, this is terrible", but they published it word for word. So I thought I could do it. From then on, I did many stories, and worked for the magazines.'

With both their careers flourishing, she and Hans were able to move to a bigger flat and then, in 1962, to the present house, though even then, she says, it was difficult to find a removals firm willing to move all their files. Not content with cutting newspapers, the Tasiemkas spent their weekends going round antiques fairs (Eastbourne was a particular favourite) buying up old magazines and acquiring such treasures as a complete set of Le Rire with illustrations by Toulouse-Lautrec.

But Mrs Tasiemka didn't stop at cuttings - she also collected Louis Wain cat paintings, Meissen porcelain, Staffordshire figurines of royal children, Georgian salt cellars and knife rests, Adam Buck tea sets, Victorian fairings.

And then there are what she calls her 'curiosities'. I must say I was a little star tled when she showed me this collection - antique china figurines of women suckling sheep. 'I am fond of sheep,' Mrs Tasiemka said dreamily, 'They're not erotica, they're just harmless. This girl is nursing a sheep, you see. And this one is suckling a fox.'

'Why would she be doing that?' I asked cautiously.

'Well, that I don't know. I wouldn't say it's my dream .'

Hans died in 1979. His widow registered the library in his name - the Hans Tasiemka Archive - and kept on cutting. Gradually, friends and friends of friends started using it and Edda's cuttings were increasingly in demand, especially during the 1980s, when most national newspaper libraries were paralysed by union restrictions.

Robert Maxwell was very keen to buy the Tasiemka archive at one stage, when he was founding his London Daily News, but he wanted 5l per cent ownership and Mrs Tasiemka would not surrender control.

But now she has decided she must give up. 'Well, I'm getting so old, you see. I've got to think of the future of the library; somebody should carry it on. And also it's got to have money pumped into it - it is not a paying proposition.'

She would like to see it housed in a university where journalism students could use it. The question is whether anyone wants cuttings any more - they take up an awful lot of space. And the unique selling point of her library - that it cuts magazines as well as newspapers - is also the most expensive to maintain.

I suggested to Mrs Tasiemka that maybe she could sell a few of the most valuable historic cuttings - accounts of Lincoln's assassination, Queen Victoria's funeral and so on - but she was horrified. 'But if you sell something, where do you stop? And it's not worth it then.'

She has never sold or destroyed anything and never would. Consequently, I don't really believe that she will sell her library, even though she says she wants to. Selfishly, I pray that she doesn't; for me and her many other devotees, it is one of the great joys of journalism.