Elisabeth Mann Borgese was the youngest daughter of Katia and Thomas Mann: she was born in Munich on 24 April 1918, and died in St. Moritz on 8 February 2002. She was Thomas Mann's little "Medi" and his favorite, and managed to step out of the Nobel Prize winner's shadow and forge her own path as a political visionary and "ambassador of the seas."
Elizabeth Mann spent most of her youth in exile, first in Switzerland, later in the United States. As a German, Czechoslovakian, American, and finally Canadian citizen, she had lived in various countries and on several continents from 1933 onward, and felt that she was a citizen of the world. In 1939 she married Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a Sicilian writer and critic of fascism 36 years her senior, with whom she collaborated on the project of a world constitution at the University of Chicago from 1946. They had two daughters and moved to Italy in 1952. That same year, Elisabeth Mann Borgese became a widow at the age of 34.
Her political and scientific thinking was holistic and global. Already in the seventies she fought for sustainability and environmental protection. Her focus was on people and their responsibility for the world in which they live. She passionately fought for a fairer distribution of resources and the preservation of the oceans as an ecological system - and did so as a self-taught scientist and often as the only woman among men. As the author of numerous books ("The Drama of the Oceans," "Living with the Oceans," and others), she also succeeded in creating broad public awareness of the importance of the oceans.
In 1978, Elisabeth Mann Borgese moved to Nova Scotia, Canada and soon took up a professorship in political science at the University of Halifax, where she lived until the end of her life.
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Elisabeth Mann Borgese. On the 100th anniversary of Elisabeth Mann Borgese's birth, this portrait by literary scholar Karoline Kühn sheds light on important reasons for her work - personal, political and contemporary.
Source of text and further information about this event: https://www.frankfurter-buergerstiftung.de/node/2558
