She draws a pretzel in the air with her index fingers and points to the desired pastry. Julia Probst is standing at the bakery counter in the supermarket in Weißenhorn (Neu-Ulm district). Short breather between the audit committee and the city council meeting. Probst is the first deaf city councilor in Bavaria. On May 16, she was sworn in for the Greens in the Weissenhorn City Council. She lives inclusion with a matter of course that has yet to arrive in large parts of society.
The parliamentary summer recess is just around the corner, the midday heat drags on into the evening. Probst opens her Calippo Cola ice cream. “I grew up here. Everyone knows everyone here,” she says on the way from the town hall to the city council meeting in the Fuggerhalle. As ordered, a car rolls by at that moment, the driver and provost wave warmly to each other.
In the 2020 local elections, she had the third most votes for the Greens in Weißenhorn, but the party only got two seats on the city council. After a party colleague moved away from the town of 14,000, Probst followed. In conversation, her blue eyes are fixed on the lips of her counterpart. As far as possible, Julia Probst hears with her eyes. She understands her counterpart with amazing precision based on the movement of her lips and gestures.
Julia Probst has already proven in the past that she has a special talent for understanding people, whether they want to be understood or not. Probst has been tweeting the #reading service live on her channel since the 2010 World Cup. She translated the insider dialogues that soccer players and coaches call out to each other on the pitch. 50,000 people follow her on Twitter. In this way, she has contributed to the fact that more and more athletes are now playing whispering on the field and holding their hands in front of each other when they are talking to each other.
Accessibility and inclusion should be automatically considered
“It’s not only important, it should also be self-evident that people with disabilities make politics. I’m not just the city councilor with disabilities.” Probst wants to establish a form of participation in which accessibility and thus inclusion are automatically taken into account. She campaigns for socially acceptable living space, wants to implement faster internet, and make sustainable decisions for a “Weissenhorn that is lovable and worth living in”. Her driving force is to eliminate injustices, not only those that she experiences herself, she emphasizes.
The town of Weißenhorn in the district of Neu-Ulm: Here the deaf Julia Probst sits on the town council for the Green Party.
(Photo: City of Weißenhorn)
When it comes to accessibility, many people think of the obstacles faced by people in wheelchairs. Platform edges, stairs. The barriers of around 15,000 deaf people in Bavaria are less visible, but no less restrictive: not only are there not enough interpreters and many television programs lack subtitles or their quality is poor. The way to public information for the deaf must be paved the way wheelchair users find their way to the train tracks.
For example: Probst demands that announcements on the platform and on the train not only have to be made by announcement for hearing people, but also on the screens for the deaf. “Hearing people are unaware of how hearing-centric the able-bodied world is.” The city councilor believes that disabled people are not considered because they are not even sitting at the table. Disabled people hardly find place in society due to the “intended separation of the special school worlds,” she says.
In the Chancellery, she complained about the lack of a sign language interpreter
After attending a kindergarten for the deaf, Probst himself went to a primary school for hearing people. She learned sign language at the age of 17. Almost eight million severely disabled people live in Germany, a large part of society and an important group of voters, she thinks. The Bundestag is far from representative in this respect, not to mention local politics. Probst persists until her demands are heard. At the open day at the Federal Chancellery in 2010, she complained that no sign language interpreter was present. A year later the same game, the Chancellor personally promised her to change that next year. In 2012, Probst was back in the ranks – as was an interpreter.
The ice cream is eaten, Probst waves her interpreters into the Fuggerhalle. Mayor Wolfgang Fendt opens the city council meeting, 26 program items: fiber optic expansion, paper bins, bicycle racks. The fact that there is an extra table opposite Julia Probst for her two interpreters is as much a part of the city council meeting as the isolated grumbling of the CSU on the subject of expanding the bicycle network. There are two interpreters because it takes full attention to translate the hour-long debate. The city bears the costs for this, and there is no funding option, says Fendt. “It is important that many different people sit on the city council, all of whom bring a new perspective,” said the mayor. Probst was also involved in the screenplay of the Saarbrücken crime scene “Totenstille”, also to depict deafness realistically.
Item number three of 26, the interpreter rubs her temples. Julia Probst sits leaning forward, leaning on her arms and listening to her with concentration. The city council members are too far away to read their lips. When Probst speaks up, she explains her request herself and the interpreter repeats it out loud so that the large group can understand it. Audism is the discrimination against deaf people. That happened to her once on the city council, otherwise she feels well integrated, she says.
“In Germany, unfortunately, there is a tradition of ignoring the needs of the deaf,” says Probst. At the end of June, the European Commission initiated infringement proceedings against Germany in the area of accessibility. Everyday tools such as public transport, banking services or online shops are not as accessible to everyone in Germany as the EU directive would have it. This also applies to 25 other EU countries.
She is grateful, says Julia Probst, to be able to learn so much as a city councilor and hopes that it will be the same the other way around.