Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (19 October 1881 – 1962) was a Dutch spiritualist, theosophist, and scholar who gained recognition in the 1920s. She lived in Switzerland for most of her life.

Olga was born in London as the oldest child of Dutch parents, Truus Muysken (1855-1920), a feminist and social activist, and Albertus Kapteyn (1848-1927), an engineer and inventor and older brother of the astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. Her father had moved to London in 1881 to work for the Westinghouse Air Brake Company and by 1887 was the Director-General of the London site. Her mother befriended like-minded people as Bernard Shaw and Peter Kropotkin. Olga attended the North London Collegiate School, where she was a close friend of Marie Stopes. At the end of the century the Kapteyn family moved to Zürich, Switzerland, where her mother became the center of a group of reform-minded intellectuals. There, Olga studied art history, became an avid skier and mountaineer, and in 1909 married the Croatian-Austrian flutist and conductor Iwan Hermann Fröbe, who shared deep interest in aviation and photography with her father. Iwan had been flutist of the local Tonhalle Orchestra since 1908, but his conducting career took the couple to Braunschweig, Munich and by late 1910 to Berlin. At the outbreak of World War I they relocated from Berlin back to Zurich, where Olga had a literary salon known as the "Table Ronde" (round table). They had twin daughters in May 1915, but Iwan died shortly after in a plane crash in September 1915 in Fischamend near Vienna.

In 1920 Olga and her father visited the Monte Verità Sanatorium in Ascona, Switzerland, and a few years later her father bought the Casa Gabriella, an ancient farmhouse nearby. Here Olga spent the rest of her life. She began to study Indian philosophy and meditation and to take an interest in theosophy. Among her friends and influences were German poet Ludwig Derleth, psychologist Carl Jung, and Richard Wilhelm, whose translation of the I Ching made it accessible to her. She also knew many members of the School of Wisdom (Schule der Weisheit), run by Count Hermann Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, whose members were engrossed in investigating the common root of all religions, as well as members of the Ecumenical Circle in Marburg.

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