More than a century after her execution, in 1917, Mata Hari remains the prototypical figure of female spy. An extreme case of “femme fatale”; she is seen as someone who not only seduced men for money, but also for the greater lust of having them killed by the thousands on the battlefield.
However, Mata Hari’s fame as a spy is usurped. Looking back at the acts of her trial, we can see the absurdity and the inconsistency of the accusations raised against her. There just was no way that she could have caused “the death of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers” as it was said. She was, rather, a scapegoat killed in order to distract the public in a moment when the war was going badly for France. Put simply: she was framed.
Still, even without the glamour and the adventure that go together with the career of a spy, Mata Hari remains a fascinating figure for us. In the present book, all the references to Mata Hari’s story, her trial, and her execution are factual. Born in a small Dutch village in 1876, in 1905 she came back to Europe from what was called at the time the “Dutch Indies”, after having divorced from her husband, a Dutch army officer. Her time in the Indies had been of just a few years, but it was enough for her to invent a kind of sensual “Oriental dances” that she presented for the first time in public in a private museum in Paris.
As a dancer, Mata Hari drew a lot of criticism at her times and it is likely that her dances were little more than strip teases with an Oriental flavor. Still, clearly she was doing something right and she became immensely popular. Her figure became also commonplace in the wave of erotic postcards which exploded in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. As years went by, Mata Hari gradually gave up with stripping naked in public and she became a high level courtesan, seducing the rich and the famous. She seems to have been successful at that, too. During the war, she may have tried her hand at being also a secret agent, but she wasn’t very successful at that. At 41, she was arrested, jailed, and then shot by a firing squad on October 15th, 1917.
It may well be that Mata Hari’s Oriental stance was not just a veneer to ennoble a little her strip teases, but it may also be that she had seriously studied Buddhism and other oriental ways while in the Dutch Indies. Her behavior at her execution, her calm, her evident belief that death was simply a passage, show that her Buddhism was not just a pose but something that she had taken by heart.
With all her originality, however, surely Mata Hari was not an intellectual. Her achievements seem to be more the result of intuition than of reasoning. She had, no doubt, an incredible skill at fascinating men, but her ability to manage her life was less than satisfactory, to say the least. Her lifestyle was always beyond her means. This, and her clumsy defense at the trial give some weight to the claim of Emile Massard that she was not very intelligent (Later on, R. Warren Howe would define her “hare brained”).
But you don’t have to be a genius to have an impact on the world and there is no doubt that Mata Hari had one. She was a very unconventional figure and being so unconventional was, at her time as in ours, dangerous. The deadly mix of nationalism and propaganda that killed Mata Hari was to continue and to explode in later years with the 2nd world war and the holocaust, leading Europe into what were the largest exterminations of innocent people that history has (so far) recorded. Mata Hari was among the first to be engulfed by this wave of senseless killing. She was killed in cold blood by people who were, most likely, perfectly aware that she was innocent but who couldn’t resist the effect of propaganda that makes it impossible to face the onrush of lies that submerge one’s reason and one’s judgment.
That things went out of control with Mata Hari is shown also in the cruel and harsh way she was treated. The pictures that we have of her at the time of the trial show us a woman physically destroyed by months of life in jail (so much for Massard’s fancy stories about her “dancing” in prison, or even requesting a “milk bath”). Seeing these photos we may, in a way, understand how Mata Hari may have considered her execution as a true liberation.
Mata Hari received also the ultimate insult, that of being denied a decent burial, of having her dead body desecrated by dissecting it on a hospital table. She was denied the status of human being. Rather, she was treated as a sort of giant insect to be disposed of. The transformation of human beings into insects and their subsequent extermination is something that Kafka had already described in his prophetic story “the metamorphosis”. Kafka died in 1924, in later times the anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined as “diabolical lies” those lies that “tamper with the very fabric of reality”. Causing people to believe that “they” are less human than “us” is one of these diabolic lies.
