This article originally appeared on VICE UK
When Edda Tasiemka was about ten, she was interrogated by the Gestapo. She's fairly matter-of-fact about it now. "My oldest brother's been in a concentration camp, my father's been in a concentration camp, my mother's been in prison," she says, now 93-years-old and casually sipping some tea.
We're in her living room, in the north London suburbs of Golders Green, surrounded by antique furniture and shelves of dusty red books. But this is no ordinary house. It's filled with a sprawling collection of newspaper and magazine cuttings, on everything from the Kray twins and Spice Girls to Ryan Giggs. Edda's archive has earned her the corny but fairly accurate nickname the "Human Google."
Edda and her husband Hans started the collection in the 1950s in their three-story home, and she registered it in 1979 after Hans' death. Manila files bulging with cuttings line every corridor, while stacks of yellowing newspapers teeter in piles. There are files everywhere: politics in the living room, medicine in the kitchen, sport in the loo, religion in the bedroom, three rooms of showbiz, and an attic crammed with crime and fashion.
Edda's closed the archive to the public now, though journalists and authors used to rely on it (for a small fee). We spoke to her about making sense of the archive's chaos, people's obsession with showbiz gossip, and what she's going to do now that the internet has just about made her collection of clippings moot.
VICE: You've had quite the journey to get here. I've read that you lived through Nazi occupation in Germany.
Edda Tasiemka: Looking back, Nazi Germany was like life on a different planet. Especially if you weren't one of them. Mummy and I lived in a block of flats, and we would never speak to our neighbors, because instead of saying 'Good Morning' you would have to say 'Heil Hitler!" Mummy and I couldn't bring ourselves to do it.
We had terrible times. One time the Gestapo came every week searching the house because we weren't in the party and never had any uniform. They always came when I was alone as a child. I can see them now—men in big trench coats would bang on the door and shout "open up or we'll trample the door in!" So I'd open the door and they'd push two big Alsatians inside, which would roam all over the place. As I say, people can't imagine it.
So you were at risk, even as a German national?
At the school I went to outside Hamburg, I was the only child of over 300 who wasn't in the Hitler Youth, so I didn't have a uniform and couldn't march with them. From time to time my mother had to visit the headmaster Herr Honko. He would always try and talk her into getting me into it. "Such a clever child, not in the Hitler Youth..."
My father was a Communist MP and was arrested soon after the Nazis came, then released at the Christmas Amnesty in 1933 – by mistake, as we learnt later. He was warned by a local policeman that he would be rearrested, so he had to ski into Czechoslovakia. Then the Gestapo came one day and arrested Mummy. They sealed the flat, but I stayed with a friend who lived opposite. It was dangerous though; he was a Jew you see. So I stayed with long lost relatives. Life under the Nazis wasn't normal life as you know it.
How did you end up in London?
I'd met Hans in Hamburg, while he was stationed in the British Army towards the end of the war. He'd been a journalist in Berlin before the Nazis came and always had bits of paper falling out of his uniform pockets. I remember asking him what all the paper was. 'They're cuttings!' he replied. He would send them to London to a friend, who kept them for him. That's how all this started.
Hans was naturalized, then de-mobbed in 1949, so we decided to get married and he got me over to England. At first we lived in a boarding house at Mrs Beasley's and kept cardboard boxes under the bed. When we had a furnished flat of our own the cuttings just grew and grew.
So then you started the archive?
At first Hans worked for the Foreign Office for their German department, and wrote articles for the publicity section. He started supplying cuttings to magazines and those journalists told others about Tasiemka, so he started charging.
I worked for a while in journalism too, though I was into civil engineering before I met Hans—I was a technical draughtswoman. We worked on the archive together and eventually the cuttings library took over and I gave up journalism.
We had to move to Golders Green in the early 60s to get more space. We have a storage unit full of files too—dead bodies, as I call them. People that have passed their sell-by-date.
How does the archive filing system work? There's just so much ... stuff.
We catalogue anyone who's been written about lots in the papers. All the files are ordered alphabetically, and if one of the files gets too fat, then it gets a special file of its own. We used to have beautifully organized rooms, but now it's all got too much!
People want the old clippings, because all the new information can be found on the internet. We have some dating back to Victorian times. Years ago I bought a stack of The Illustrated London News, so heavy you could barely lift them, from an old bookshop in south London. They'd been keeping them in the cellar. I still have some left to cut!
What are some of the subjects that you get the most requests for?
British personalities, I suppose. Showbiz: that's what people want. OK, HELLO, Tatler, and all the daily papers as well—The Mail, The Express, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, everything. Nowadays, about half our customers only want magazines because they can't get them on the internet.
We keep a record of what everyone requests and what we send to them in our 'red book.' The last requests we've had include Julian Fellowes, Helena Bonham Carter, Lord Lucan, Mindy Kaling, Lady Kitty Spencer, the Queen—perhaps in time for her 90th birthday celebrations. We've got the Ecclestone sisters here, Peaches Geldof, WAGs, 'rich kids.' Someone was looking for royal ghosts here... we do have a lot on the supernatural.
A German journalist here was asking after the Krays, and we've got two huge files on them. I remember the Kray stories would be all over the newspapers: double spreads in The News of the World and The Sunday People. They were notorious, you know. Criminal gangsters. They ruled the East End completely, and people were terrified of them.
What's going to happen with the archive? I know you were looking for a buyer for it years ago.
I wish I knew. Robert Maxwell expressed an interest but there were never any firm negotiations. I didn't want to sell it at the time. I would sell the archive now, yes, but I don't think anyone's as silly as me! It would have to be sold in one lot, though. Otherwise if you sold it off in bits and pieces, where's the value? People would ask, why is this subject missing? I'd be very sad to see it go, though.
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