Memories from the First Researchers of German Sign Language

Abstract

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• Memories from the First Researchers of German Sign Language
• Siegmund Prillwitz (bio), Alexander von Meyenn (bio), Wolfgang Schmidt (bio), and Regina Leven (bio)

Introduction

This contribution is made up of separate memoirs from the first team that Siegmund Prillwitz pulled together around 1982 to begin research on German Sign Language (DGS) at the University of Hamburg. The "Three Musketeers" in this text refers to the first deaf researchers who worked with him: Alexander von Meyenn, Wolfgang Schmidt, and Heiko Zienert (who died in 2019). Regina Leven was also in this first research team and, at the same time, was one of the first DGS interpreters. In 1997, Prillwitz, von Meyenn, Zienert, Schmidt, Leven, and Bernd Rehling all received the Cultural Award [End Page 406]

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Siegmund Prillwitz in 1989. Photo courtesy of Thorsten Herbig.

of the German Federation of the Deaf, which is awarded every four years, for their pioneering work. DGS was officially recognized in Germany in 2002. Prillwitz retired in 2005.

The contributions from Prillwitz, von Meyenn, and Zienert are English translations of interviews from television broadcasts, as well as from interviews published on the University of Hamburg website.¹

Siegmund Prillwitz

In 1979, I was an assistant at the University of Hamburg for the German language and was asked by Professor Kröhnert, professor of deaf education at the university at that time, to create seminars for teachers of the deaf so that they could better teach the deaf German [End Page 407] grammar. When I took a look at how this was done in schools, I was suddenly quite fascinated that during breaks in the instruction, the deaf students, even though signing was forbidden in class, still signed. And as a linguist, I wanted to know more about this, so I went to a kindergarten, early education classes, and a deaf club, and from then on, I became more and more interested in sign language.

Then I was very lucky to meet Wolfgang Schmidt, social pedagogue at the Hamburg School for the Deaf, then Heiko Zienert, and Alexander von Meyenn. Beginning in 1982, every Monday, before going to my string quartet with my violin, we met at my home: Heiko, Alexander, and Wolfgang—three deaf intellectuals—and Regina Leven.

Actually, I had come across the topic before through the literature. Before that, I had no contact with deaf people or sign language, neither through my relatives nor as a linguist. I had also largely succumbed to the common prejudice against sign language: "Yes, that's probably a makeshift means to somehow communicate something visually."

Our group started an investigation in which we looked at families with deaf children who were in their first five years of life up to the beginning of school, to see how communication took place. And it was quite shocking to see that everything didn't go well. Then Rolf Schulmeister, Hubert Wudtke, and I—a team of three on the hearing side—went to the school for the deaf on Hammer Strasse here in Hamburg to observe the teaching. We were supported by Professor Kröhnert, who opened the doors there for us. In the classes we observed, deaf children really made an effort to somehow cope with reading, repeating, articulating, etc. It wasn't really about knowledge at all, it was always just about these few sounds that they put together to form certain words and tried to improve. This was the so-called "German method," which had been the school practice for more than a century worldwide, and especially in Germany until the 1980s.

Actually, the teachers were in an equally bad situation as their students, especially after it became clear that the children had their own language, and that teaching could be done on a completely different level if sign language was mastered and used by the teacher. That was [End Page 408] then the motivation for us—to get the instructional staff on board with using sign language in class as quickly as possible and to give them a way to learn this language.

My idea was always, "Gee, why don't you turn the tables for half an...