This Europe: Elusive Mata Hari makes a curtain call

A household name at the beginning of the First World War, Mata Hari was shot as a spy and her body then dissected by medical students.

But, whileMata Hari has no grave, her memory lives on. Now the small Dutch town of Leeuwarden, where she was born, is planning to buy the childhood home of the exotic dancer as a tribute to its most controversial citizen.

Born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1876, the daughter of a shopkeeper and his Javanese wife, she was orphaned in her teens and married and divorced by 26. She then went to Paris where she launched her career as a naked dancer under the stage name Mata Hari, which means "Eye of the day" in Malay.

Famous for her nudity and her off-stage affairs, Mata Hari became the stuff of legend. At the start of the war she spied for the Germans. She was later hired by the French to pass on secrets. They executed her in 1917, saying her treachery had led to the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers.

In recent years Mata Hari has been seen more as a scapegoat. Gerk Koopmans, director of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, argues: "Things were going badly. A lot of soldiers were dying and the French had to divert the public's attention from their failings. Who better to use and blame than a famous person and a wicked lady?"

Despite the interest in a new museum, there may be a problem in filling it. Mata Hari's short and eventful life left little by way of memorabilia. The current exhibition relies on a handful of photographs, a few letters and two scrapbooks she made of her career. When she was executed Mata Hari left debts so vast that everything she owned had to be sold to pay creditors. Mr Koopmans concedes: "There is very little sign of her life left. We are truly dealing with a myth."