Mata Hari

Archetypal femme fatale and likely scapegoat, Mata Hari tempts Sophie to identify a modern-age temptress of near-equal notoriety.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Matahami and the Art of Becoming Someone Else, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies that my college students occasionally read without being directly threatened, and today your companion through one of the most dazzling, tragic, and thoroughly mythologized lives in modern European history. I want to begin with a question not a rhetorical one. I find purely rhetorical questions a bit lazy, frankly, the intellectual equivalent of asking but what is a sandwich really? But a genuine one. What does it take for an ordinary person to become a legend? Not a great soldier, not an elected statesman, not a scientist whose work reshapes human understanding of the universe, just a person. With a particular face, a particular body, a particular ruthless gift for self invention, and the very great misfortune of being spectacularly interesting at exactly the wrong historical moment. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. Lovely place, terrifically ordinary in the best possible English way, the kind of town where ambition is considered mildly suspicious, and reinventing yourself consists primarily of switching from Tetley to Yorkshire Gold. The woman we are discussing today reinvented herself so comprehensively that her original identity was effectively erased by her own hand, enthusiastically, and for reasons that make complete sense when you understand where she started. She was born Margarita Gertrude Zelle on the seventh of August 1876, in Leewarden, in the Netherlands, which is, I say with all due respect to the Dutch, not the most glamorous origin story ever told. Leawarden is a perfectly respectable provincial city in the province of Friesland, and if you have never heard of it, that is precisely the point. She would become Mata Hari. Leewarden would remain Leewarden. Her father, Adam Zell, was a hat merchant who, for a period in her early childhood, was doing rather well. He spoiled his daughter by most accounts. She was by all descriptions a striking child, dark, vivid, physically precocious, possessing the kind of looks that in a provincial Dutch city in the eighteen eighties, probably constituted more of a social complication than an asset. Her mother died when Margareta was fourteen. Her father, having lost his business to some combination of speculation and misfortune, effectively lost interest in his children's practical welfare not long after. By fifteen Margareta was being passed between relatives. By sixteen she was enrolled in a school for teachers in Leiden, and here we get the first glimpse of the woman she would become, because the headmaster of that school became rather infatuated with her, and the situation ended badly and abruptly, and with Margareta on the move again. She was eighteen when she answered a newspaper advertisement placed by a Dutch colonial officer named Rudolf MacLeod. He was seeking a wife. He was thirty eight, a captain in the Dutch colonial army stationed in the Dutch East Indies, which is what we now call Indonesia. He was not, by any surviving account, a warm or gentle man. He was considerably older than she was, prone to drinking, intermittently violent, and brought to the marriage a preexisting illegitimate child, and a set of personal habits that would have made any reasonable woman's heart sink on the honeymoon. Margaret married him anyway, in eighteen ninety five. She was nineteen. The options available to a young woman without money, without parents, without prospects, in the Netherlands in eighteen ninety five were not extensive. Marriage was not a choice so much as a logical necessity, wearing the costume of a romantic occasion. They moved to Java and then to Sumatra. And here, in the Dutch East Indies, surrounded by a culture entirely unlike anything she had known, immersed in Javanese music and dance and ritual, and the lush, violent sensory abundance of the tropics. Something happened to Marguerite Zell. She began to watch, she began to absorb. She began to understand, perhaps for the first time, that identity was not a fixed condition, but a performance that could be studied, rehearsed, and deliberately improved. The marriage was a disaster. There was a son, Norman, and a daughter, Jeanne Louise, known as No. Norman died in eighteen ninety nine. The circumstances are disputed, likely poisoning by a disgruntled servant, though some accounts suggest syphilis complications, and the whole thing is deeply sad, regardless of the specific mechanism. The marriage limped along for a few more years before collapsing entirely in 1902. MacLeod took custody of Non, cruelly, vindictively, and essentially as a punitive measure against Margaretha for having the temerity to leave him. She returned to Europe alone and essentially destitute. She was twenty six years old. She had a dead child, a stolen child, no money, no family support, and no marketable skills beyond a very good face, a body she knew how to use, and several years of watching Javanese temple dances. What she did next is either the most resourceful act of self-invention in the history of European popular culture, or the most audacious confidence trick of the Edwardian era, depending entirely on how you feel about the distinction. She went to Paris. In nineteen oh three, Paris was the centre of the world, or at least of the world that mattered to anyone interested in art, performance, money, and the kind of glamorous social life that makes later biographers very happy. The Belle Epoque was in full flower. Orientalism was fashionable. The West's fascination with unimagined, exoticized, sensually charged East was at its absolute cultural peak. Exotic dances, sacred rites, ancient mysteries. Parisian society couldn't get enough of it. The audience was primed, the stage was set. All that was needed was a performer. Margareta Zell looked at this landscape and made a decision of stunning boldness. She would not be a Dutch divorcee with a dead child and no income. She would be Mata Hari. The name in Malay means eye of the dawn, or eye of the day, it's the word for sun, poetically rendered. She chose it with care. She constructed around it a complete alternative biography. She claimed to be the daughter of a Javanese temple dancer, born in the sacred traditions of the East, trained from childhood in dances of divine meaning. She performed in private salons first, then in public theatres, then at the Muse Guillet, the Museum of Asian Art, which was the most credibility conferring venue she could possibly have chosen for the performance of fake, sacred Indian dance. The audience was Society Paris. They were absolutely enchanted. Now, was any of this true? Virtually none of it. She had learned some elements of Javanese dance from watching local performances in the Dutch East Indies. The rest were self taught, improvised, and performed with such conviction that the question of authenticity became remarkably beside the point. She was not a trained temple dancer. She was a woman from Learwiden, with excellent instincts about what European men wanted to believe about the exotic East, and the willingness to perform those beliefs back at them until they open their wallets. This is, I want to know, a form of genius an uncomfortable form, built on fabrication, certainly, but the ability to read an audience, identify its fantasy, and then inhabit that fantasy so completely that the fantasy becomes your primary social reality, that is not a trivial skill. It is, in fact, exactly the skill that every successful politician, every successful actor, every successful demagogue in human history has possessed in abundance. Matahari simply applied it to herself, personally and physically, with extraordinary directness. She became famous, genuinely, thunderously, internationally famous. She performed across Europe. Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid. She was written about in newspapers with the kind of breathless reverence that today we reserve for film stars. She had lovers, a great many of them, and rather deliberately. She understood with cold clarity that her body was her primary commercial asset and her primary social currency, and she used it accordingly. Her lovers were typically wealthy, typically older, frequently military or aristocratic, or both. She lived in considerable style. She wore extraordinary clothes. She ate at the best restaurants. She was for about a decade the most talked about woman in Europe. And then the Belle Epoch ended, in the way that historical periods tend to end, all at once, catastrophically, and with an enormous amount of artillery. The First World War began in August nineteen fourteen, and it changed everything for Matahari in ways she did not fully appreciate until it was much too late. She was thirty-eight in nineteen fourteen. She was no longer quite at the peak of her performing career. The market for exotic dance had inevitably moved on somewhat. She had spent years in a lifestyle that required constant and considerable income to maintain. She had lovers in multiple countries, including Germany. She had spent time in Berlin, which was now an enemy capital. She had, in short, exactly the profile cosmopolitan, sexually independent, internationally connected, without fixed national loyalty, that a war panicked European security apparatus would find maximally suspicious. She became a spy or she became a woman accused of being a spy. The distinction in her particular case is rather harder to draw than one might wish. The evidence suggests that she was recruited or made a tentative agreement to report information by German intelligence, likely around nineteen fifteen. She appears to have been designated Agent H twenty one. She also, subsequently, offered her services to French intelligence, apparently under the impression that this was either clever hedging or a straightforward financial transaction. French intelligence gave her the code name AF forty four. What French intelligence also did was intercept what they believed to be German radio communications, identifying her as an agent. The French at this point were losing the war at a rate that produced institutional paranoia of operatic proportions. The military was looking for explanations for failure. A glamorous foreign woman sleeping with military officers was an explanation with tremendous narrative convenience. She was arrested in Paris in february nineteen seventeen. She was tried by a military tribunal in July. The trial was conducted in secrecy. Standard wartime military procedure also conveniently preventing the scrutiny of evidence that might have complicated the outcome. She was convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. On october fifteenth, nineteen seventeen, Matahari was taken to the Chateau de Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, and shot by a firing squad of twelve men. She refused a blindfold. She refused to be tied to the post. By all accounts she faced the firing squad with a composure that impressed even the people who had come to kill her. She was forty-one years old. Whether she was genuinely a German spy in any militarily significant sense remains to this day genuinely disputed. Post-war analysis of German intelligence records suggested that H-21 provided information of essentially no operational value. The intercepts used to convict her were, some scholars have argued, produced by German intelligence precisely to get rid of an agent who had become more liability than asset by ensuring the French would eliminate her for them. She may have been a spy. She may have been a fraud of a spy, taking German money and providing nothing useful in return. She may have been entirely framed by an intelligence service that had already decided to execute her and needed documentary cover. We do not know. We will probably never definitively know. What we know is that she died as she had lived, performing. Refusing the blindfold was the act of a woman who understood that the scene required a certain staging and who intended to control her final appearance. The audience this time was a firing squad and a handful of military witnesses, but the instinct was the same one that had carried her from Leewardon to Paris to the stages of Europe. She would not be undone. She would not flinch. She would meet the gaze of history directly and let it make of her what it wished. History has made rather a lot of her. She has become one of the most enduring archetypes of the twentieth century, the femme fatale, the dangerous woman, the seductress spy. Her image has been used to sell everything, from perfume to political paranoia. She has been the subject of dozens of films, novels, plays, and academic studies. Her story has been told and retold and mythologized to the point where the actual Margarita Zell, the girl from Lewiden, the colonial wife, the mother of a dead child and a stolen child, has become almost impossible to see beneath the accumulated legend. And now, as I promised, a tease because I have someone in mind, and I think you should have to think about it for a moment before I tell you. Picture someone who, like Matahari, constructed themselves almost entirely from scratch. Not who they were born as, but who they decided to become. Picture someone who understood with exceptional clarity the desires and fantasies of their audience, and who delivered those fantasies with a precision that made the audience feel they were receiving something authentic and personal, when in fact they were receiving something extraordinarily carefully calculated. Someone whose primary instrument was themselves, their body, their image, their persona, deployed with the strategic intelligence of a field commander. Picture someone who attracted extraordinary attention, controversy, adoration, and hatred in roughly equal measure. Someone whose private conduct diverged rather significantly from their public presentation, and whose response to that gap was never apology, but always more performance. Someone who was accused at various points of things that range from the merely scandalous to the genuinely serious, and who navigated those accusations with a sung fro that left observers either impressed or infuriated, rarely anywhere in between. Picture someone who was, at the peak of their cultural moment, one of the most talked about women in the world. Someone whose face was everywhere, someone who made people argue about whether they were a legitimate artist, a commercial cynic, a feminist icon, a problematic figure, a genius, or a fraud, often several of these simultaneously, from the same person in the same conversation. Picture someone who shaped and was shaped by a particular historical moment, and who understood that moment's desires better than almost anyone else alive. Who is this person? It is Kim Kardashian. Take a moment, I'll wait. I am watching from here the faces of people who think I've lost my academic credibility, and also the faces of people who are nodding slowly and thinking yes, obviously. Both groups are gonna have to sit with each other for the rest of this episode, I'm afraid. Pull up a chair, it gets more interesting. Let me build the case, because I would not make this comparison if I did not think it was intellectually defensible, and I do not put things in front of audiences I cannot defend. My doctoral supervisor was a woman of withering standards, and I have not recovered from the training. Kim Kardashian was born Kimberly Noel Kardashian in 1980 in Los Angeles, California. Her father, Robert Kardashian, was a lawyer who became famous during the O. J. Simpson trial. Her mother, Chris Jenner Ney Hutton, is one of the most strategically gifted media operators of the late 20th and early 21st century. A woman who deserves a separate podcast and possibly a business school case study. Kim grew up wealthy, privately educated, socially connected in the specific world of Los Angeles celebration. Celebrity adjacency. She was not unknown before her own fame, but she was not famous. She was the pretty friend, the personal assistant, the person in the background of other people's photographs. And then in 2007, a sex tape that had been made with her then boyfriend was distributed by Vivid Entertainment. And her mother, rather than allowing this to be the scandal that buried her daughter, negotiated a settlement that ensured the tape's public existence and simultaneously launched a reality television show called Keeping Up With The Kardashians on the E network. The show ran for twenty seasons. Twenty? In television years that is roughly equivalent to geological time. It made Kim Kardashian one of the most recognizable human beings on Earth. Now, I can hear the objections forming Kim Kardashian is not a spy. Kim Kardashian is very much alive and, by all available evidence, thriving. These are all true. I am not arguing that their biographies are identical. I am arguing that their structural positions in history share a set of characteristics that are worth examining together. Here is the first parallel and the deepest one. Both women built their primary identity as a self-constructed performance, and both did so under conditions of limited conventional alternatives. Matahari's options in 1903 were constrained by her gender, her class, her marital status, and the era. She could not become a lawyer, a doctor, a politician, a businesswoman in any meaningful sense. She could perform. Kim Kardashian's options were not similarly constrained by law or era. She existed in a world where women could do all of those things. But the specific cultural economy she inhabited, the Los Angeles celebrity ecosystem of the early 2000s, offered its own particular set of available paths. She chose the path of the image, the persona, the self as content. In both cases, the woman assessed her available resources and made a strategic decision that was, in the context of her particular world, entirely rational. Second parallel, the understanding of audience desire. Matahari knew with brilliant intuition what her Parisian audience wanted to believe about the exotic East and gave it to them. Kim Kardashian knew with equally brilliant intuition what the early social media era wanted intimacy, access, the illusion of genuine self revelation, and gave it to them. Both women created the experience of authenticity without surrendering actual authenticity. You felt you knew them, you did not know them. Third parallel, the body as primary instrument. Matahari's career was built explicitly on the display and deployment of her physical self. Kim Kardashian's career is substantially built on exactly the same foundation. From the early years through to her influence on beauty standards, the KKW Beauty Empire, the Skim's Shapewear line, which is, in its own way, a fascinating comment on the relationship between image and commerce. Both women understood the commercial and social value of their physical presence with a precision that made critics extremely uncomfortable, because it revealed how much of that value was generated by male desire and female deployment of it. The critics tended to blame the women for this, which is a very old story and no less tedious for being old. Fourth parallel, the legal and criminal entanglement. Matahari's story ends with a trial and an execution. Kim Kardashian has not been tried for anything. I want to be entirely clear about that, but she has engaged substantively with the criminal justice system, most notably in her advocacy work for criminal justice reform, which has included successfully lobbying for the release of specific individuals and working with legal teams on clemency petitions. She passed the baby bar exam in California in 2021 and has spoken publicly about pursuing legal qualification. Whether this represents genuine conviction or a new phase of self-construction or both simultaneously is a question I leave to you, but it is worth noting that both women in different ways found themselves in intimate relationship with systems of law and punishment, and that both navigated those relationships in ways that were characteristically bold. Fifth parallel, the question of victimhood and agency. This is, I think, the most important one, and the one where the comparison becomes most illuminating. The historical treatment of Matahari has involved a great deal of debate about whether she was a victim of the war, of misogyny, of a judicial system that needed a scapegoat. Or an agent. A woman who made choices, who took risks, who played a dangerous game, and lost. The answer, of course, is both, and the refusal to hold both simultaneously is itself a historical failure. Kim Kardashian has been treated to a very similar binary. She is either a victim of a culture that commodifies women's bodies, or she is a cynical operator who has exploited that culture for personal gain. Again, both, obviously. Again, the refusal to hold both simultaneously is a failure of analysis. Both women occupied a position in which their agency was real and their vulnerability was real, and in which powerful cultural forces had a significant investment in making them legible as one or the other, because the combination was too complicated and too uncomfortable. A woman who is both knowing and vulnerable, both strategic and exposed, both the author of her situation and its subject. That is a woman who cannot be neatly categorized and whom institutions tend to find destabilizing as a result. Where do the parallels break down? Several places, most significantly, Matahari's performance was fundamentally about deception. She claimed to be something she was not, from a culture she did not belong to, with a history she had invented. Kim Kardashian's performance is paradoxically built on the premise of radical transparency. She shows you everything, or everything that she decides constitutes everything. The deception, if it is deception, is one of depth rather than surface. Matahari lied about who she was. Kim Kardashian curates who she is. These are different operations, even if the strategic intelligence underlying them is recognizably similar. Also, Matahari lived in a world that killed her for being what she was. Kim Kardashian lives in a world that has made her a billionaire for it. This is progress of a kind, I suppose, though I will leave to others the question of exactly what kind. So who is the more compelling figure? I promised you a verdict, and I deliver verdicts. My friends find this quality both useful and occasionally exhausting, particularly at the cinema. Matahari by a margin that I find both emotionally clear and professionally defensible, not because her story is more admirable. In terms of raw impact on the world, Kim Kardashian's measurable influence on beauty standards, on media, on commerce, on criminal justice advocacy, on what is arguably an entirely new category of celebrity is probably greater. She has changed things, but things are different because of her. But Matahari's story contains a dimension of tragedy and genuine historical injustice that Kim Kardashians, thankfully, does not. Matahari built herself from nothing, out of desperation, as much as ambition, performed that self for fifteen extraordinary years, and was then consumed by a historical catastrophe that she had no power to foresee or prevent. She was used by intelligence agencies, possibly framed by one of them, tried in secret, and shopped. The original person, Margarita Zell, the girl from Leewoden, the mother of Norman and Non, disappeared so completely behind the legend that it took scholars the better part of a century to find her again. That is a story about what happens to women who are too visible, too unconventional, too self-authored, in a world that has not yet decided to tolerate them. It is a story that is in its bones Shakespearean, and I am a historian who was educated at Cambridge, and raised in a town where people are politely fascinated by tragedy as long as it is safely historical. So perhaps that is my weakness showing? Perhaps I am simply more moved by women who paid the ultimate price than by women who negotiated the very good deal. Perhaps that is a bias I should examine. I have noted it. I am moving on. Margaretha Gertruida Zell, born in Leerwarden, eighteen seventy six, died outside Paris, nineteen seventeen, known to the world as Matahari, Eye of the Dawn, the woman who remade herself so completely that only historians have ever really looked for who she was before, the woman who danced for kings and died refusing a blindfold. She would have been unbearable at a dinner party. She was almost certainly a liar of considerable talent. She was possibly a spy, probably a fraudulent spy, and almost certainly not a spy worth shooting. She was absolutely and without question one of the most extraordinary individuals of the twentieth century, and the fact that she is remembered primarily as an archetype rather than a person is both her achievement and her epitaph. I'm Sophie Manners. You've been wonderful company, do read widely, travel curiously, and if you're ever in Kingston upon Thames, the scones at the cafe by the river are entirely acceptable, which is about as warm as we get. Good evening.