One of a kind.(Short Story)

Although critics have always included Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) in the canon, neglected stories like "Ein Original" ("One of a Kind") may help us to reclaim her as a feminist. First published in 1898 and later in the collection Aus Spatherbsttagen: Erzahlungen (1901), it portrays a girl who excels in the male-dominated field of electrical engineering, the circa-1900 equivalent of computer science, and who does so with paternal support and approval. Here Ebner, herself a trained watchmaker and married for five decades to an engineer, writes knowledgeably about technology while questioning those cultural dichotomies that pit "feminine" feeling and literary art against "masculine" rationality and technical craft. Her ending, however, suggests the risks. (LD)

If the claim that there are no one-of-a-kind originals anymore is true, then all those who have met Gabriel Teufenberg can boast that they have seen something that does not exist.

His outward appearance stimulates neither interest nor dislike. He is two meters tall, correspondingly broad, with the complexion of a rosy, well-fed child and a large face with small features, a fine, narrow nose, a well-shaped mouth over which a thin, almost white moustache shimmers like silk. His brows and eyelashes are also nearly white; his eyes are round and blue and express nothing at all.

Oh, what cold mute eyes my son has, thought his mother as often as she looked at him, even colder than his late father's!

She herself had warm brown eyes and was, despite her forty-six years, still an attractive, charming woman. She had found no happiness in her marriage to a difficult man who was not her intellectual equal; she had been much courted and celebrated and yet her reputation remained undamaged. Her indolent husband had left the conduct of his estate, the administration of his fortune, to her, and her son followed this example. He could not have done anything more sensible; his mother governed gladly and successfully and, aside from this, exercised in city and country the most charming sort of hospitality. Her household was graced by her three young orphaned nieces, each of whom she would have welcomed as a daughter-in-law. But Gabriel paid his cousins no more attention than wax dolls would have received from him, that is, motionless wax dolls, for ones that moved would have awakened his liveliest interest. He had an enthusiasm for everything mechanical, for machines large and small. As a child he constructed pumps, mills, and elevators from paper and tin, and they actually moved when you pulled a little string or turned a crank. Later he had less luck; the big agricultural machines on which he made all kinds of improvements sat motionless.

His life continued along quietly. He went to bed early and got up late, took two hours to wash and dress, and ate a great deal, slowly and without the least culinary appreciation. If someone had asked him: What do you prefer, potatoes or Perigord truffles? he would have answered: It's all the same to me. During his winter residence in the city, he spent evenings at the theater or in the club over a game of whist, and what was being performed at the theater and whether he won or lost the game were all the same to him. In the country he spent almost all day in the workshop that he had set up in the manor. "The Vulcany" was what the ladies called it. There they had to fetch him when they wanted his company for an excursion outdoors; and even on the prettiest stroll or ride, surrounded by three lovely, vivacious girls, he was thinking about machines.

"Look, Gabriel," said his mother to him one day, "you should marry one of your cousins."