Because her head is missing, from the Paris Museum where it was kept.
There are many reasons to tell the story of Mata Hari – an extravagant icon of femininity, famous burlesque performer, World War I spy, and “collector” of high one standing lovers – her life reads like a harlequin novel. But arguably one of the most curious (and morbid) anecdotes of her life occurred after her death (by execution, no less). As if her missing severed head wasn’t enough to lead with, it has also come to light that the rest of her body, which was entrusted to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, also disappeared from the archives. So what happened to Mata Hari?
I think it’s stretching to call Mata Hari an “icon of femininity” except in the negative sense.
Margaretha Zelle was a woman who throughout her life was used and then betrayed by men. Her father went bankrupt when she was thirteen and abandoned his family to run off with another woman. A teacher started flirting with her so she was pulled out off school by her uncle, who was now her guardian. She ran away from the uncle’s house. She got married to an army officer who was twenty years older than her because he liked her looks in a photo. But her husband was a heavy drinker and was jealous when other men looked at his attractive younger wife. Her husband started sleeping with other women and got syphilis. Margaretha’s son died and she left her husband. She won custody of their daughter and child support in court but her husband refused to comply with the decision.
So Margaretha needed a way to earn a living. She became a stripper and prostitute under the identity of Mata Hari. She was popular for about ten years but then men started saying she was getting too old (she had passed thirty).
World War I broke out and French military intelligence recruited Margaretha as a spy. She had no experience as a spy and was poorly trained by the French. French intelligence assigned her to work in Germany but bungled the handling of her. The Germans discovered she was a French spy. The French declared she was a double agent who had willingly gone to work for Germany to cover up their own incompetence. Margaretha was arrested and executed by the French, dying at the age of 41.
A sad story of a woman who was exploited throughout her life by a system that gave men power over her.
Sad indeed, but this isn’t about Mata Hari the woman; it’s about Mata Hari the severed head. In other words, why mess with a ghoulish Straight Dope thread when you can pour cold water on the legend of the Great Temptress No Man Could Resist, even if the facts tend to complicate matters?
(I hope the head was spirited out by a museum employee who thought the whole idea of preserving this “souvenir” was an unfortunate relic of another age, and gave it a decent burial. Maybe that should be the end of the whole affair. More likely it will be fodder for endless Unsolved Mysteries-type programs.)
Well, if it’s amusing stories about World War I era corpses we’re looking for, did you know that Manfred von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron) has been buried and reburied six times since his death in 1918?
Throughout history, there are many examples of the fascination there seems to be with severed heads. John the Baptist is a famous example and, of course, the plethora of severed heads produced during the French Revolution. One could go on and on. I just don’t get it. It’s not like a head, once severed, continues to look the same. On the contrary, it rots and ends up a featureless skull. So, what’s the deal?
For some reason, composers’ skulls prove to be desirable keepsakes: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The Marqis De Sade, who’d probably prefer it that way, and supposedly Geronimo is the skull in Yale’s Skull & Bones. Filmmaker F. W. Murnau lost his head, after his death in a car crash (if the *Hollywood Babylon * version of how the crash occurred is accurate , it matches a Lou Reed lyric from Walk on the Wild Side).