In analogy to Thomas Mann’s famous lecture The Years of My Life (1950), his daughter, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, contemplates the times in which she lived. She remembers her youth, marked by World War ii and exile in the United States, and describes how postwar American and European intellectuals laid the foundations of an international body of law, inspired by a world federalist ideal. Mann Borgese points out that times have changed to the extent that man has become conscious of the importance of nature and environment.