FEMME FATALE, FALLEN WOMAN, SPY

reassessed and commemorated in the Netherlands, the country she tried to leave behind at age 19. The Museum of Friesland in Leeuwarden is staging a biographical exhibition devoted to her life, while the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam is reprising a contemporary ballet, which premiered in 2016 to great popular success. A theatre piece focused on her mysterious life and performed by singer and actor Tet Rozendal is also touring the country.

“Her story is still relevant in that she’s a woman who does not conform to society’s norms, and to anyone else’s ideas,” said Ted Brandsen, managing director of the Dutch National Ballet. “She’s really about female transgression: She breaks through the limits of respectability.”

The commemorations in the Netherlands all attempt to separate the myth of Mata Hari from the truth of Margaretha Zelle’s life. But Zelle often presented herself as someone else from somewhere else — as Mata Hari, the exotic princess from the East — and her compatriots have had an uneasy relationship with her persona ever since.

Although her childhood was spent in a prosperous household, her father, a hat merchant and speculator, lost all his money when she was 14. A series of tragic events followed: Her parents divorced, her mother died, her father left her with relatives and that didn’t go well. At 18, she answered a newspaper ad from a 39-year-old captain in the Dutch colonial army, met him for a date and married him five months later.

Zelle’s husband, Rudolph MacLeod, took her with him to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where she learnt some Javanese dance and had two children. Her son died suddenly at age 3, possibly from mercury poisoning by a nanny. The couple divorced; when her husband refused to pay alimony, she left her daughter with him and found ways to support herself.

In 1903, she moved to Paris. Later, when asked why, she is reported to have said, “I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went there.” She was equally saucy and vague about her personal history once she transformed herself into

Although today’s exotic dancers are associated with grimy clubs, Mata Hari’s sensational premiere took place at the Musee Guimet in Paris, an art institution where it was seen by upper-crust socialites, and her enormous and immediate success thrust her into their ranks. “She was at least a millionaire at one point,” said Hans Groeneweg, the curator of the Museum of Friesland exhibition.

Preparing for the exhibition took four years. Groeneweg and other curators researched Mata Hari’s past extensively and drew new conclusions about her history. It was not entirely clear that she ever spied for the Germans, for example, though she admitted to taking money from them, perhaps because she was broke at the time.

“When you read what information she gave to the Germans, you think it’s all very small,” Groeneweg said. “Like she’d tell that there was going to be an offensive in the spring, but everyone already knew that.”

The exhibition presents original documents from her trial — including her “confession” document — that were unsealed by the French authorities in January, along with personal letters and diary entries, on loan from Zelle’s family, that have never been shown to the public.

Artefacts of her life include a gold brooch she bought for her daughter, her prayer book and a portrait of her painted by Isaac Israels. The exhibit ends with a wall of posters from books and films that have focused on her life, including films in which she was played by Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Femme fatale, fallen woman, brazen double agent — every generation has its own version of Mata Hari.

Today, Groeneweg said, there is a “bigger, broader picture” of the woman known as Mata Hari.

“We are trying to focus on more aspects of her life than only her dancing career or whether she was a spy,” he said. “When you focus on Margaretha as a mother or a spouse, you can relate to more aspects of her life.”

But the documents from the French archives have not filled in all of the gaps, Groeneweg said. “In some way, perhaps we have to be glad not knowing the complete story,” he added. “Something of the myth has to be preserved.”