Mata Hari on postcard

After the execution of Mata Hari at the age of 41 by the French, innumerable postcards and postal stationery have been issued by many countries to celebrate the life and dance style of the Dutch woman who was praised as the most beautiful woman of her times by many writers and critics. Throughout the world there are many restaurants, clubs, villas, companies, video games, and even computer software named after her. Her head was cut of and mummified and stored along with the heads of 100 criminals guillotined or executed by the French firing squad at the Museum of Anatomy - The Musée d'Anatomie Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière - now located on the eighth floor of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris V René Descartes University, 45, rue des Saints-Pères, VIe arrondissement of Paris, France. The rest of her body was also received here and kept there. But both were noticed as missing since time of the Second World War, all other items of the museum remaining in tact.

Mata Hari: the legend and cultural influences

Image: Mata Hari postcard

A number of postcards/view cards and art items popularizing Mata Hari became a fashion. Immediately after her execution by the French, questions rose about the justification of her execution. The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent, using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers fired the popular imagination, and made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale.

The Hollywood film, Mata Hari (1931) starring Greta Garbo in the lead role, became the greatest hit of Garbo’s career and the top grosser of MGM that year. The film, though based loosely on real events in the life of Margaretha Zelle, who became famous with her stage name Mata Hari, the plot was largely fictional that appealed to the public appetite for fantasy at the expense of historical facts. The exciting and romantic character in this film, Mata Hari, inspired subsequent generations of storytellers. Consequently, Mata Hari was featured in more films, television stories, and in video games. Many books have been written about Mata Hari, some of them being serious historical and biographical accounts, but many others were highly speculative, deviating too far from the real life of Mata Hari.

There is a very popular statue of Mata Hari in Leeuwarden, the place where she was born in The Netherlands.

Mata Hari performing in 1906

Photo: Mata Hari performing in 1906, wearing only bra and jewelry

Mata Hari brought to the European stage a carefree provocative style of oriental dance, she picked up during her stay in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and her style was an instant hit with the audiences. Her dance style was spectacularly successful and she elevated exotic dance to a more respectable status, thereby breaking new ground in a style of entertainment for which Paris later became world famous. Her free-willed attitude and uninhibited dancing in exotic and revealing clothing made her a very popular woman. She posed for provocative photos and mingled in circles of wealthy and powerful men in politics, royalty, and military, not only in Paris but all other capitals and major cities of European countries. In that period, as most Europeans were unfamiliar with the Dutch East Indies and thought of Mata Hari as exotic, it was assumed her claims of being a Javanese princess of Hindu origin were genuine. By 1910, innumerable imitators of her exotic dance style had arisen in Paris and other European cities.

Mata Hari performing in 1905

Photo: Mata Hari performing in 1905

After returning from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to the Netherlands with her husband Rudolf John MacLeod, Mata Hari was legally separated in 1902 (divorced in 1906), and in 1903 she moved to Paris, where she performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod. Struggling to earn a livelihood, she also posed as an artist's model.

By 1905, Mata Hari became famous as an exotic dancer, adopting the stage name Mata Hari. She was a contemporary of the famous dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who were pioneers of the early modern dance movement, which looked to Egypt, India and other Asian countries for artistic inspiration. Flirtatious and openly flaunting her body, she was an instance success from her debut at the Musée Guimet on 13 March 1905.

Mata Hari's Scrap Book

Photo: The scrapbook of Mata Hari exhibited at the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.

Mata Hari, who was accused of as a German spy during the World War I and executed by a French firing squad on 15 October 1917, was born as Margaretha Zelle on 7 August 1876 in Leeuwarden, where the museum is situated and in which there is a 'Mata Hari Room', well-known for research into the life and career of Leeuwarden's world-famous citizen.