History of the Deaf

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Artist's impression of the "nature of deafness " by the deaf French actor and activist Bruno Moncelle (1993)

The History of the Deaf (English Deaf History ) deals with the history of the deaf itself as well as with the changing cultural effects of deafness and the institutions involved.

The term "Deaf History"

The English name Deaf History in means German "History of the Deaf", "History of pigeons being" or "history of the deaf one" based on the realization that the story on life in numbness, not on the Hörunvermögen based.

Since research into one's own history was initiated primarily by the North American community of deaf people, the term Deaf History is sometimes used in Germany instead of the German name.

The association "Deaf History International" was founded in 1991 at the first International Deaf History Congress in Washington, DC , USA , and organized international congresses.

Spread of deafness

Deaf people have probably existed as long as humanity has existed. About 0.02 percent of the human population is either born deaf or deaf before the age of 19. Of these, between five and ten percent are inherited from one or both deaf parents. In enclosed areas, however, genetic deafness can spread to a much greater extent. The population in two villages on the North American island of Martha's Vineyard in the 17th century consisted to such a large extent of deaf people that “everyone spoke sign language” (the title of a book on this story by Nora Ellen Groce).

Another part of those affected was born deaf due to maternal illnesses during pregnancy, e.g. B. by rubella or measles , further also deafness occurs due to diseases in childhood . Under today's conditions, the extent of this prenatal and postnatal deafness has a total rate of around one to two percent.

Due to the knowledge of spoken language as the majority language, deafness in adolescence and adulthood and old age hearing loss do not have the specific effects of deafness that has existed since birth or childhood.

As long as the population density was very low, deaf people were always only individual phenomena and had no history of their own . Only with increasing population density were deaf people able to come together in groups and, under certain circumstances, develop specific communication with gestures. When and where this happened in the earliest times is reported in Plato's dialogue between Kratylos and the Hittite and Sultan royal courts.

It is currently estimated that around 14 million of the total German population (approx. 80 million) have a hearing impairment. Around 80,000 of them are deaf, of which around 35,000 are registered members of the associations of the German Deaf Association .

Although deaf people - as can already be seen from the figures - live very scattered among the population, they have nonetheless built up stable communities among themselves and spend most of the time outside their working life among their own kind.

The Christian view of divine destiny

Deaf people have been in Europe for a long time and especially under the rule of the Christian church not considered full human beings, since they are the "divine" language did not, with their mastery of himself man for former opinion from the animal differed. The church father Augustine (354–429) spoke based on Paul ( Rom 10,14  EU ): “Whoever cannot hear can therefore not believe”. However, he later retracted this opinion by saying that the deaf person could gain faith by signing when he observed a Milanese deaf in sign conversation and heard from someone in an area in Italy with large numbers of deaf and hearing people sign-speaking . However, this view has not been taken up by deaf education educators.

The physiology of the body was seen as being fed by spirituality, life as a divine principle, pneuma, spiritual breath. A paralyzed hand is a dead hand abandoned by life, the deaf person's ear is spiritless, a hollow envelope without the innate feeling, this “very astute breath, implanted by the hearing mind since we were born”, as Ambroise Paré (1509–1590) said with his Believed to be able to detect dissections. The lack of hearing implied a lethargic existence.

From the early Christian point of view, Jesus drove away blind and mute spirits, the possessed physically handicapped is given back to society through a miracle. In the deaf and mute, Jesus healed the ear and the organs of speech, with the Ephata formula he opened the spirit: two healing phases are not entirely sufficient without this very last action, opening the windows and doors to speech would be nothing without this spiritual inner authority that does that Listening to understanding expanded and freed from silence by expressing thoughts.

The early scientific view

Are deafness and dumbness pathological change or absence of the senses?

According to the ideas of the time, the lack of ability to speak appeared to be a fundamental deficiency. The memory existed only through the articulated words that fixed the feelings in the consciousness and thus allow the will to be awakened. The lack of a memory supplies the imagination of man with a parade of uncontrolled images following the pattern of dreams or madness. The mute do not attain memory and consciousness, they persist in the fraying of the subhuman and animal.

The Roman legislators discussed whether deaf dumbness should be classified as an illness or a deficiency. The acoustics as a science developed by the Greeks in the debate between those who the Pythagorean view of the mathematical regularity of music, and those that the emotional evaluation of Aristoxenus were inclined. Given the close connection between acoustics and music, it never occurred to the scientists to ask the acousticians about the nature of deafness. In any case, science was primarily concerned with ideal models and not with the "accidents" of nature; medicine in particular was more concerned with general knowledge than with descriptions of symptoms.

The simultaneity of deafness and dumbness challenged scientific interpretation. There was a theory of "anastomosis", a nerve connection that was suggested by Hippocrates and Claudius Galenus or Galen (2nd century) and circulated into the 17th century. In this sense, Montaigne (1533–1592) also proclaimed a “natural seam” that connected the auditory nerves and the facial nerves that were seen as responsible for speaking . Barthélémy Eustache (1510–1574) assumed that the two nerves were injured. Realdo Colombo (... around 1560) described the simple voices and the inarticulate tones of the pigeons that would be passed through the retrograde nerve while the facial nerve controlled the organs of articulation.

Lazare Rivière (1589–1655) distinguished the fundamental deaf-mute, which should be an organic injury to the auditory and facial nerves, from the physiological deaf-mute, based solely on damage to the auditory nerve, which causes the impossibility of appropriating speech.

In response to the apparently twofold ailments, practitioners pursued two main routes of healing: the inner ear received long and often painful treatments.

The organs of speech were subject to even more radical invasive procedures; a cut through the tongue was supposed to “liberate” the language, following the observations of “miraculous healings” of mutes through traumatic shocks, such as the son of Croesus, king of Lydia, mentioned by Herodotus (490-430 BC). He was mute from birth and remained so despite all attempts at healing. While fighting for the capital, Croesus was attacked unnoticed by a Persian warrior. In order to warn his father, the mute cried out and thus regained speech. Other cases were listed, for example to justify resection of the root of the tongue, because it was assumed that it was damaged by emotions.

In this situation, the mute were equated with the mentally ill - in view of the seemingly lacking reasons for the mute - with the physically handicapped of all directions, the stutterers and lisplers, comparable to confusing limping with paralysis. Aristotle (384–322 BC), himself the son of a doctor, studied natural history and the science of species without being a practitioner. Nevertheless, he found that deaf people could not converse by birth and that those born blind were of higher intelligence than those born deaf.

“Deaf and dumbness” was still regarded as a pathological phenomenon until recently, as the following entry shows in the description of the Oehringen District Office from 1865: “The residents are generally in mediocre, often poor financial circumstances and enjoy good health ; only in haywood shows cretinism (two dumbbells and three deaf-mutes) ”.

Social implications

Because of the already widespread illiteracy , deaf people, despite their marginalization, still had comparatively greater opportunities for social adjustment until the Middle Ages than in the following centuries . The church granted baptism to deaf people in the 5th century , but not marriage until the 11th century , confession in the 13th century and the possibility of taking the monk's vows in the 16th century (according to Aude de Saint Loup, “Darationen Tauber im West European Middle Ages ”, 1993).

The observations in connection with a group of settlers on the North American island of Martha's Vineyard , the 1630 from the Kentish Weald emigrated, however, that the deaf also had at such an early time not automatically be a marginal existence, but this is a consequence of different social settings show is .

16th and 17th centuries

The small size and, above all, the direction of the records that have been preserved from the past centuries means that the history of deaf people can largely only be reported from the perspective of their pedagogical recording.

With the first establishment of schools for children, there were also educationally active people who tried to teach deaf children, be it for humanistically or religiously motivated reasons or for the sake of the money or the perks that socially better-off parents were willing to give.

It should be noted here that at that time monks of the Christian Church, despite the reservations about the “human” status of the deaf, were most likely able to communicate with them, because there were special signs and finger alphabet for silent communication due to the prevailing confidentiality in monasteries were invented, e.g. B. in the Cistercian monastery in Amiens, northern France, where the deaf Etienne de Fay received his education from the monks who signed there and later worked as an architect and librarian and even taught deaf children before the time of the Abbé de l'Epée .

18th and 19th centuries to the Milan Congress

From around 1700 onwards, the main known events and developments took place primarily in German-speaking countries, France, England and New England and the USA. They influenced each other partly, partly the developments in the same period ran in different directions. To make this visible and comparable, an attempt is made with the parallel representation of data and events in three columns.

Samuel Heinicke and the Abbé de l'Epée are committed to the educational care of deaf children, using different methods they provided the basis for the later methodological dispute of the “deaf and dumb” and deaf education in the 19th and 20th centuries through an exchange of letters .

Since the Milan Congress in 1880

Oral "speaking lesson" of a deaf student in the Netherlands (1938)

The resolutions passed at the Milan congress of the “deaf-and-dumb educators” in 1880 on a one-sided verbal or oral education are enforced in practice. As a result, crippling lethargy has spread among deaf people in Europe and North America for decades . The world wars 1914–1918 and, above all, the period from 1933 to 1945 with the targeted persecution of deaf people under the rule of National Socialist Germany , with their unmanageable effects, also contribute to the uncertainty and reduction of the social life of deaf people.

In the second half of the 20th century, however, there were new impulses which, compared to the previous attitude of the “deaf and dumb educators”, signaled a new acceptance of sign language . In the middle of the century, the linguists Bernard Tervoort in Europe and William Stokoe in the USA first demonstrated the status of a full-fledged language for sign language. Especially in the last quarter of the 20th century, this stimulates linguistic research into sign languages ​​in all countries of the world.

With the linguistic recognition of sign language, there is a self-confident movement of deaf people in the sense of a "Deaf Power" in many countries to acknowledge deafness as a normal state, sign language and the deaf culture. Special cultural forms emerge as a result: Deaf painters develop a special art form, called " Deaf Vision in Art " (DeVIA) with special exhibitions, deaf theater performances increasingly touch topics related to deafness, deaf poets present sign language poetry, deaf-oriented films are made, deaf-specific cultural festivals ( Culture days in Germany, France, Sweden, USA, the Czech Republic) are being held, literary products are being published more and more by deaf authors than ever before, and Deaf Studies are being established in some universities.

Technological progress in electronics in the last quarter of the 20th century led to an almost overturning development. For the first time after 1965, deaf people were initially able to use the telephone network with writing telephones, at least within their community and also for emergency calls to the police or fire brigade . In the further course of the usual standard devices more and more new functions are chosen by deaf people, z. B. Radio-TTY and Deaf Messenger in the USA.

A first extension of the "reachable" telecommunication connections beyond the write telephone connections is possible with the fax machine. With a commercial distribution of the much earlier "invented" videophone deaf can communicate over the telephone network for the first time in their own sign language. Further "range" extensions are possible with the SMS function of mobile phones and the e-mail services of the Internet . After the Videophone has proven to be a commercial flop, sales are largely stopped. At the same time, however, video conferencing programs for computers were being used instead of videophones.

With the advent of the Internet, the information opportunities for deaf people have expanded to a far greater extent.

With the introduction of webcams , sign language telecommunications are shifting from the telephone network to the Internet.

See also

Literature and media

  • Alexander Graham Bell: Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race ; Document in The Bernard Becker Medical Library; Washington, DC: [without publisher] 1885; restored by Chris Parrish, 2001. SUBJECT: Deafness US - Washington 1885 CALL #: CID B433a 1885 OCLC #: # 05425720; LOC: RARE BOOKS; DATE: 1885; Held at: WUM0 Update: 6-JUN-2003 12:06 PM MARC # 20775 CN: 485167
  • Elisabeth Brockmann (Ed.): In two worlds - fates of deaf foster children ; Paderborn 2007; ISBN 978-3-8370-0886-9 .
  • Hans-Uwe Feige: Because deaf and dumb people follow their animal instincts ... Gutenberg Verlag und Druckerei GmbH, Leipzig 2000; ISBN 3-934340-00-8 .
  • R. Fischer, H. Lane (Ed.): Looking back. A reader on the history of deaf communities and their sign languages ; Hamburg, 1993.
  • Nora Ellen Groce: Everyone spoke sign language here. Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard Island in 1990 ; translated from the American; Hamburg: Signum 1989 2 ; ISBN 3-927731-02-1 .
  • Harlan Lane: Hear with the soul. The story of deafness ; Munich, Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988; ISBN 3-446-15169-9 . Original: When the Mind hears ; Random House, New York 1984.
  • Susan Plann: A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835 ; Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press. 1997.
On the concept of "Deaf History"
  • Günther List: Field of work and concept of "Deaf history" - an attempt at clarification . In: Daszeichen 7:25 (1993), pp. 287-329.
  • Renate Fischer: History of the Deaf ; Washington, June 1991. In: Daszeichen 5:17 (1991), pp. 372-373.
  • Renate Fischer, Harlan Lane (Ed.): Looking back. A reader on the history of deaf communities and their sign languages ; International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf; 20; Hamburg: Signum 1993.
  • Renate Fischer, Tomas Vollhaber (eds.): Collage: Works on international deaf history ; International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf; 33; Hamburg: Signum 1996.
  • Herbert Josef Christ: Report on the 1st Deaf History meeting in Leipzig from 4. – 6. October 1996 . In: Daszeichen 11:39 (1997), pp. 110-119.
  • Ulrich Möbius: Aspects of “Deaf history” research . In: Daszeichen 6:22 (1992), pp. 388-401 and 7:23 (1993), pp. 5-13.
Biographical

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On this also: Dirksen L. Baumann: Listen to Deaf Studies ; Section “The Prehistory of Deaf Studies”; in the sign , Issue 79, Hamburg, July 2008, ISSN  0932-4747