Elisabeth Borgese, 83; Activist Was Thomas Mann’s Daughter

Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who had an eclectic career as an environmentalist, political scientist and writer, has died. She was 83.

The last surviving child of German writer Thomas Mann, Borgese died Feb. 8 in a hospital in St. Moritz, Switzerland, of complications from a lung infection. A resident of Halifax, Canada, Borgese fell ill while on a skiing vacation in Switzerland.

One of the organizers of the International Peace in the Oceans Conference, Borgese was a strong presence at the first meeting in 1970 and at the 29 that have followed. The meetings helped bring about the United Nations Law of the Seas Treaty in 1982.

A strong proponent of aquaculture--the farming of seas, lakes, rivers and oceans--Borgese also founded the Malta-based International Oceans Institute, which was established to train people in developing countries to manage ocean resources. The institute now has 20 branches around the world.

Born in Munich, she was the fifth of the six children of Mann and Katia Pringsheim Mann. With the rise of Hitler, she immigrated with her family to Switzerland, where she studied the piano and cello at the Conservatory of Music in Zurich.

Her father immigrated to the United States in the mid-1930s, but she stayed in Europe to continue her musical studies.

There she met Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, an Italian writer and scholar who was 36 years her senior. They were wed in Princeton, N.J., in 1939.

Her husband took a post in Chicago teaching political science and she took jobs as an editor and a researcher before joining the Encyclopaedia Britannica as executive secretary of the board.

Borgese immersed herself in her husband’s view of world federalism, which he had hoped would bring order to international relations at the end of World War II. “That was really when I became politically engaged,” she told Macleans magazine some years ago.

But in 1952, the political intolerance fueled by McCarthyism compelled the Borgeses to return to Europe. Her husband died shortly after their return.

Over the next decade, she raised the couple’s three children while expanding her interests. She edited an Italian-language cultural journal for the Ford Foundation, and wrote short stories and a feminist treatise titled, “The Ascent of Woman.”

She also dabbled in animal learning and at one time reportedly taught her dog to play keys on the piano.

From 1964 to 1979, she was a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. She later joined the faculty at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she taught political science and later law.

She is survived by two daughters, a son, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.