Elisabeth Mann Borgese

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Elisabeth Veronika Mann Borgese , CM , (born April 24, 1918 in Munich ; † February 8, 2002 in St. Moritz , Switzerland ) was a maritime law expert and ecologist as well as a publicist, non-fiction author, short story writer and founder of the scientific journal Ocean Yearbook . In the course of her life she had four citizenships, the German, the Czechoslovak, the US-American and the Canadian. It was characteristic of Mann Borgese that she felt at home in all countries regardless of that. The fact that in international maritime law today the seas are regarded as a common good that is worth protecting and vital to survival is based on Mann Borgese's work from the late 1960s. In 1970 she became a founding member and first female member of the Club of Rome , and she was instrumental in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea . It is also thanks to her that there has been an International Tribunal for the Sea since 1996 .

Life

Katia Mann with her six children in 1919 (from left to right: Monika , Golo, Michael, Katia, Klaus and Elisabeth on Erika Mann's lap)

Elisabeth Mann grew up as the fifth child and youngest daughter of Katia Mann b. Pringsheim and Thomas Mann in Munich in upper-class families. There she attended the Luisengymnasium . Elisabeth Mann is considered to be the favorite child of her father Thomas, who portrayed her in Gesang vom Kindchen and as "Lorchen" in the novella Disorder and Early Suffering . She was the only one of the six siblings to report of a happy childhood and a life that was not burdened by her father's celebrity.

In 1933 she followed her parents via France into exile in Switzerland and graduated from the Free Gymnasium in Zurich in 1935 . At the age of fifteen she fell unhappily in love with Fritz Landshoff , the friend and publisher of her brother Klaus , who, however, did not return her love because he admired her sister Erika very much.

Elisabeth Mann received Czechoslovak citizenship in November 1936, shortly before the National Socialist regime revoked her German citizenship (along with her siblings Golo and Michael and both parents). In 1937 Elisabeth Mann passed her teaching examination at the Zurich Conservatory, where she trained as a pianist. In 1938 she moved with her parents into US exile in Princeton . On November 23, 1939, she married Giuseppe Antonio Borgese , the anti-fascist intellectual, literature professor and writer who had emigrated from Fascist Italy in 1931 and who was thirty-six years her senior. She had already been fascinated by his book The March of Fascism before she met him in her parents' house. She finally gave up her career as a pianist after the marriage. With Borgese she had the children Angelica (* 1940) and Dominica (* 1944) and lived in Chicago . In 1941 she was granted US citizenship, and in 1983 she chose Canadian citizenship.

After the war she returned with her family to her husband's home in Florence . Borgese died of a stroke in 1952 , and husband Borgese lived with their two daughters temporarily with their parents, who had meanwhile settled in Kilchberg on Lake Zurich . In 1953 she returned to Italy and settled in San Domenico near Fiesole . The Italian psychiatrist, author and colleague Corrado Tumiati (1885-1967) became her partner for the next few years and from 1955 until his death, husband Borgese lived with Tumiati in San Domenico and in Forte dei Marmi , where she had built a holiday home . From 1964 to 1967 Mann Borgese lived for professional reasons alternately in San Domenico and in California, in Santa Barbara . In 1967 husband Borgese met Arvid Pardo , Malta's UN ambassador , who later became her partner.

From 1967 until her death in 2002, Mann Borgese was professionally traveling around the world to international maritime policy consultations, the founding of institutes, celebrations and honors, from 1978 in addition to her work as a professor for international maritime law in Canada.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese died of unknown reasons in 2002 during a skiing holiday in the Engadine and was buried in the family grave in Kilchberg near Zurich.

plant

In the 1940s, Mann Borgese worked as a research fellow on the committee for a world constitution at the University of Chicago and became president of that organization. In the 1950s she worked as a translator, among other things her translation from German into English of Heinrich Schenker's standard work Harmonielehre ( Harmony ) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1954 . During these years, Mann Borgese worked as an editor for the Italian edition of the cultural magazine Perspectives ( Prospetti ) and for the UNESCO cultural magazine Diogenes .

In 1963 Mann Borgese published her scientific essay Ascent of Woman (Eng. Ascent of Woman - Descent of Man? 1965), the result of two decades of research. In it, Mann Borgese deals in an interdisciplinary manner with the question of how sexes have developed from asexual life in the animal kingdom over time. Mann Borgese uses this perspective to show how gender roles work in humans and the importance of reproductive tasks. In the last chapter, My Own Utopia , she describes her personal and biographical drive for this study and gives the reason why she never smiles in photos of her childhood. Among other things, Mann Borgese comes to the conclusion that families are crisis-ridden arrangements, and sums up - in a utopian view: "In the end, cooperation always triumphed over the conflict, which represents a lack of cooperation."

From 1964 Mann Borgese was Robert Hutchins' research assistant at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, California . From 1967 Mann Borgese worked against the pollution and overfishing of the world's oceans, was able to convince Hutchins of the urgency of this topic and in 1968 presented a preliminary draft for a constitution on the law of the sea .

Just two years later, in 1970, the year the Club of Rome was founded, Mann Borgese organized the first international conference on the law of the sea, which took place in Malta. Mann Borgese founded the International Ocean Institute in Malta in 1972 and became its first director. She also set up the Independent World Commission on the Seas , an organization with UN observer status.

The third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1974 dealt centrally with the environmental issues raised by Mann Borgese. Her 1975 book The Drama of the Seas has been translated into thirteen languages.

In 1978 she accepted a visiting professorship at Dalhousie University in Halifax , Canada , and in 1980 she was appointed professor of international law at the Faculty of Political Science . Also in 1978, Mann Borgese founded the scientific journal Ocean Yearbook and served as a longtime co-editor.

The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is largely based on Mann Borgese's work.

Broad impact in the German-speaking area

In Germany, Elisabeth Mann Borgese became known to a wide audience through the documentary feature film Die Manns - A novel of the century , in which she first gave deep insights into the history of her family , inspired by the interviewer Heinrich Breloer .

In the 1990s, Mann Borgese, with journalistic foresight, suggested the establishment of a German-language general-interest magazine on the subject of seas, which resulted in mare. The magazine of the seas , which has been published monthly since 1999.

Mann Borgese wrote most of her books in English, as did all of her academic work. Some of the German translations of her popular non-fiction books achieved large print runs and are still available in stores more than a decade after her death.

Honors

  • Elisabeth Mann Borgese Sea Prize was awarded from 2006 to 2009 by the Schleswig-Holstein state government to outstanding personalities who care for the protection and preservation of the seas.
  • " Elisabeth Mann Borgese ", German research ship of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW)
  • Mann Borgese was elected honorary member of the IUCN in 2000.
  • On April 12, 2018, Deutsche Post AG issued a postage stamp with a face value of 370 euro cents on the occasion of Elisabeth Mann Borgese's 100th birthday . The design comes from the graphic artist Nicole Elsenbach from Hückeswagen .

Works (selection)

Books

  • To Whom it May Concern (German. Two hours. Stories on the edge of time , stories 1957)
  • Ascent of Woman (1963) (German ascent of woman - Descent of man? List Verlag, Munich, 1965)
  • How to Talk to People (1965)
  • The Drama of the Oceans (1975) (German: The Drama of the Seas , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1977)
  • Seafarm: The Story of Aquaculture (1981)
  • The future of the world's oceans. A report for the Club of Rome (1985)
  • The Immortal Fish (Stories 1998)
  • Live with the seas. On Dealing with the Oceans as a Global Resource (1999)
  • How Gottlieb Hauptmann abolished the death penalty (Stories 2001)

Translations into English

  • Heinrich Schenker : Harmony [1906]. English title: harmony . Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1954.

Journalistic work (selection)

literature

Interviews and discussions with husband Borgese

  • Gero von Boehm : Elisabeth Mann Borgese. July 1, 1989. Interview in: Encounters. Images of man from three decades. Collection Rolf Heyne, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-89910-443-1 , pp. 210-217.
  • Wolf Gaudlitz, Elisabeth Mann Borgese et al .: Elisabeth Mann Borgese - the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. An audio portrait. 4 CDs (245 minutes). Audiobook, Freiburg / Breisgau 2010, ISBN 978-3-89964-387-9 .
  • Wolf Gaudlitz, Elisabeth Mann Borgese: My father the magician - My love for the sea. In conversation with Wolf Gaudlitz. Audio book. Production of the BR. Audiobook, Freiburg 2001, ISBN 3-933199-66-2 .

To the scientific and world political work

Biographies

  • Kerstin Holzer: Elisabeth Mann Borgese. A life portrait. Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-15725-0 .

Borgese man in family terms

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolf Gaudlitz, Elisabeth Mann Borgese et al .: Elisabeth Mann Borgese - the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann . An audio portrait. 4 CDs (245 minutes). Audiobook, Freiburg / Breisgau 2010, ISBN 978-3-89964-387-9
  2. ^ Elisabeth Mann Borgese (author portrait at mare. Die Zeitschrift der Meere ), mare online , undated, accessed on May 24, 2013.
  3. ↑ Kerstin Holzer: The emancipation of Elisabeth Mann Borgese . br.de/radio/bayern2, accessed on May 24, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b Wolf Gaudlitz, Elisabeth Mann Borgese et al .: Elisabeth Mann Borgese - the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann . An audio portrait. 4 CDs (245 minutes). Freiburg 2010 ISBN 978-3-89964-387-9 , CD 4
  5. ↑ Elisabeth Mann Borgese: Ascent of Woman - Descent of Man? List Verlag, Munich, 1963, p. 261.
  6. ↑ Dalhousie University Obituaries, Elisabeth Mann Borgese In Memoriam, Dalhousie News Volume 32, Number 7; March 13, 2002, archive link ( Memento from April 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Visionary women working for environmental protection - 1899 until today. Exhibition catalog. Curation: Sabine Diemer and Dr. Anna-Katharina Wöbse, editor: Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU), 2013, p. 96
  8. ↑ Elisabeth Mann Borgese: Youngest daughter of Thomas Mann died , faz.net, accessed on May 27, 2013
  9. ^ His children - Elisabeth, Monika, Michael In: thomasmann.de, undated, accessed on May 25, 2013.
  10. ^ Honorary Membership of IUCN
  11. ↑ Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Drama of the Seas , literaturhaus-muenchen.de, accessed on May 24, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Husband Borgese, Elisabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Husband Borgese, Elisabeth Veronika (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Canadian marine lawyer and ecologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 2002
Place of death St. Moritz , Switzerland