EX-KAISER’S GRANDSON

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 3

EX-KAISER’S GRANDSON

TO MARRY FILM STAR. Another chapter in the romantic and matrimonial troubles of the Hohenzollern family has been written. Following the sensational marriage of Princess Victoria, the ex-Kaiser’s sister, to Alexander Zoubkoff, a dishwasher in a Russian, restaurant, comes the news that Prince Louis Ferdinand, a son of the former German Crown Prince is to- marry Miss Lily Damita, the film star.

The engagement has not been officially announced, but his father admitted to an English interviewer that it was true. “You English-speaking people have an excellent proverb,” he added, “that one cannot eat one’s cake and have it, and that is what my son will have to realise if he insists on marrying a woman who is not his equal in birth and station.” “Have you any definite wishes regarding your son’s future wives?” he was asked.

“Besides being as pretty as possible, they should also have other points,” he said. “But, joking apart, I have what I suppose many people would consider old-fashioned ideas as regards marriage. . “I think a 'mesalliance’ is liable to vzork out as a ‘mere mess,’ and is rarely a real alliance, if you will pardon the pun. There have been plenty of them lately, and my own family has furnished a lamentable example leaving my aunt ruined and miserable. “I believe in equality of station; marrying in your own set, your own circle. It might be perfectly admissible and normal for one of my boys to .marry a woman, not necessarily of royal blood but of aristocratic or noble birth, no matter what her nationality provided that he obtained the consent of the Kaiser, whom we all consider as the authoritative head of our .family. “Without such consent we could not approve of the marriage. Royal princes have married women who were not of royal birth, for instance the Duke of York, and as long as the marriage is one of quality and is accepted by the other members of the Royal Family which the bride or bridegroom is entering, there is, in my opinion, no objection to be made. “Princess Yolanda of Italy is another case in point. But as regards this particular marriage, if it .should ever be seriously intended on both sides I should oppose it on principle also, because leaving apart for the moment the question of birth I do not believe in marriages founded on passing passions. Mere passion is no basis for the life partnership and ‘social contract’ as which marriage should be regarded.”