Edda Tasiemka
Archivist upon whom generations of journalists relied thanks to the vast store of cuttings she built up
EDDA TASIEMKA, who has died aged 96, was a German émigré who was revered by many journalists as the owner of the best cuttings library in Britain.
It was unique in that it included articles cut from magazines as well as newspapers, and from German, French and Swiss publications. She also owned a fine archive of historic cuttings – contemporary accounts of the American Civil War, the opening of the Great Exhibition, the death of Queen Victoria and so on.
This treasure trove was housed in her own home in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London, and largely hidden away in beautiful antique chests and cupboards – nothing so vulgar as a filing cabinet was allowed to intrude, though even her kitchen, bathroom and garage were stuffed with cuttings. Those on international football, one of the few subjects which held little interest for her, were stored in the first-floor lavatory.
She was born Edda Hoppe in Hamburg on August 5 1922. Her father was Paul Frolich, a well-known Communist leader and biographer of Rosa Luxembourg, but he never married her mother, and was expelled from the Communist Party and forced into political exile in the US when Edda was still a baby.
She was brought up in a village outside Hamburg but, even as a child, was keenly aware of political events: she remembered that when the Nazis came to power in 1933 many of her mother’s friends were arrested and disappeared. Consequently she refused to join the Hitler Youth, which meant that she was disbarred from her local secondary school and had to commute many hours a day to attend one in Hamburg.
Her mother was arrested on New Year’s Eve 1938, and imprisoned for six months, during which time the l5-year-old Edda had to fend for herself. The consequent disruption of her education meant that she was unable to fulfil her dream of becoming a civil engineer, though she trained as a technical draughtswoman.
When the war ended, Edda worked as a secretary for the British Army of occupation in Hamburg and always said she learnt her (excellent) English by taking dictation from “my Major Holt” of the Royal Engineers. In 1949 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 French Foreign Legion and, eventually, the British Army. He was in the habit of carrying around pieces of paper which tended to overflow from his pockets and fall to the ground. “When I asked him what they were,” she told Vice in 2016, “he said ‘they are cuttings’. That’s how it all started.”
He was 17 years older than Edda but, according to her, “politically on the same level”. They moved to London together and married in Hampstead register office – Tasiemka’s friend Peter Lorre, the film actor, stood them lunch at the Dorchester and Mrs Lorre gave Edda a pair of camiknickers as a wedding present.
The couple lived first in a north London boarding house run by a Mrs Beasley, where their nascent archive was stored in boxes hidden under the bed. Hans Tasiemka collected them as reference material for his articles and also went round antiques shops buying up old magazines. It was a source of sadness that Edda proved unable to have children, but cats – and cuttings – filled the gap.
She had a lifelong fear of dogs, dating back to her childhood memories of being taunted and threatened by German shepherds which the Nazis used to let loose in her home, but in later life, to the irritation of some of her neighbours, she befriended the neighbourhood fox, whose typical menu would include chicken and beef.
The Tasiemkas moved to successively larger flats and then, in 1962, to the house in Hampstead Garden Suburb that would be so fondly remembered by generations of journalists. Edda, meanwhile, had become a successful journalist, writing for many German magazines.
Hans Tasiemka died in l979 but Edda carried on cutting, and registered the library as The Hans Tasiemka Archives in his memory. For some years the Tasiemkas had allowed friends and friends of friends to use the library – Robert Lacey started using it in l974 to research his book
Majesty and recalled: “After five years of dealing with the Sunday Times cuttings library, who said things like: “Why would we cut Women’s Own?” it was just wonderful to find these massive folders drawn from the most esoteric sources – American and European magazines, clearly clipped with love and fascination.”
As word spread, more and more journalists started using the archive and Edda Tasiemka invested in photocopiers and fax machines. However, she never advertised for customers because she lived in terror that the authorities might close her down as a fire risk – on official forms, she called herself a “researcher” rather than a librarian.
After Hans Tasiemka’s death, Edda found happiness with Peter Knight, a literary agent and former syndication director of Express Newspapers, whom she always referred to as her “toy boy” or “young man’” he being four years younger. They were fond of going to dinner-dances (“smoochy dancing”, Edda insisted) and to the theatre and opera, and they dined by candlelight twice a week.
Edda was a brilliant cook by all accounts – “The only woman,” according to John Pearson, “who really knew how to bone a chicken.” But Edda always refused to marry Peter Knight and said it was “much more harmonious” that way.
She was an obsessive collector, not only of newspaper cuttings, but of Meissen china, Georgian salt cellars, knife rests, Staffordshire figurines of Queen Victoria’s children, Louis Wain cat paintings, Victorian fairings and Regency tea sets with Adam Buck mother-and-child decorations.
She also had a most peculiar collection of china figurines of women suckling animals, mainly sheep. “I do like sheep,” she explained, and indeed, she had two life-size model sheep in her drawing-room.
Into her eighties, she retained her puckish sense of humour: journalists who only dealt with her by phone used to be surprised by her Christmas cards, in which she posed sitting on Father Christmas’s lap or frolicking on the lawn with her sheep. She remained fiercely Left-wing to the end of her life, and went on the two big anti-iraq war marches when she was 80.
Successive attempts to house the cuttings collection with British academic institutions came to nothing. Last year, when she was 96 and felt too frail to carry on, she handed the archive over to a former DJ and documentary producer, James Hyman, who entered Guinness World Records for owning the world’s largest magazine collection. He installed it in a temperature-controlled warehouse in Woolwich and plans eventually to put it all online.