KUHLMANN THE FORTUNE HUNTER.

Taihape Daily Times, 16 April 1918, Page 3

KUHLMANN THE FORTUNE HUNTER.

A £5,000,000 ‘ < CATCH - ’ ’

Kuhlmaun, German Foreign Secretary, was born in Turkey, and is quite obviously a fortune-hunter by profession, for his engagement to Germany’s richest heiress (the former Fraulein “Baby” von Friedlander-Fuld) is his second marriage for money. His first wife, w T ho died less than a year ago while he was Ambassador in Constantinople, was a Fraulein von Stumm, heiress to part of the huge fortune amassed by her late father, Baron von Stumm, the Ehenish-Westphalian steel and iron magnate. The moment is appropriate for explaining that Kuhlmann is not a “baron,’ ’ as he is frequently, but mistakenly, called in England. All German noblemen with the prefix of von claim, when abroad, the “courtesy title” of baron, but they are only given it in Germany itself by tradesmen and obsequious servants. Kuhlmann’s bride-to-be, who, after her separation from the English husband to whom she was married in January, 1914, received Imperial permission to resume her maiden name with the prefix Frau, will some day inherit a fortune of £5,000,000. She is the only child of the late Silesian coal king, Privy Councillor Fritz von Fried-landcr-Fuld, who paid taxes in Berlin on an annual income of £300,000. The Friedlander-Fuld, are Jews by birth and origin, but became converts to Lutheranism to gratify social aspirations. Fuld w r as the maiden name of Frau von Friedlander, who was a Dutchwoman. From what I know of Frau von Fxledlandcfr-Fuld’s 'Berlin career have no doubt whatever that she engineered the Kuhlmann match, says F. W. Wile in the “Daily Mail.” She always pined to be a Prussian Mme. do Stael, the brilliant Parisienne whose political and diplomatic intrigues finally resulted in her expulsion from France by Napoleon I. Frau von Friedlander-Fuld, was a banker’s daughter, like Mme de Stael, whose father (Neekar) was Louis XVl’s celebrated Minister of Finance.

The Friedlander-Fuld palace, adjoining the French Embassy in PariserPlatz, Berlin, was at the height of its diplomatic glory, under its mistress’s aegis, during tho Moroccan crisis in 1911 The then Foreign Secretary, Herr von Kiderlen-Wachter, a bachelor was the central figure of the political salon over which the coal king’s consort presided. A trophy which she exhibited with glowing pride was tho pen with which the eventual Franco-Ger-man agreement over Morocco was signed by Kiderlen-Wachter. Kuhlmann will be 45 years old next month. He was born in Constantinople while his father was director-general of the Anatolian railways. His finance© is about 25. She is an extremely pretty , woman, and accomplished linguist. During the war she has been a Bed Cross nurse in Berlin hospitals. Mr. Gerard, the late American Ambas-, sador in Germany, speaks in “My Four Years in Germany,” of having met the ex-German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann at the young Frau von Friedlander-Fuld’s dinner party.