ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

1 It is only with the heart that one can see rightly … (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

2 Best of Elvis

3 Blind is the one who refuses to see

4 Communication serves the proper self (Jens Wildenhain)

5 Love at first sight

6 Learning on the model

7 Colors, shapes and optical illusions

8 A crossing is a crossing is a crossing

9 The slightly different alphabetization

10 ‘Wrapping artist’

11 Jazz dance with open eyes

12 TV-listening with pictures

13 From the Eye Confusion Book to the Yearbook

14 Summary: seeing with all senses

View to the sky

Notes

1 It is only with the heart that one can see rightly … (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Self-awareness is your awareness of the world, which you experience through the five senses (sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell). Pay attention to your sensory impressions and be aware of those five ways that the world comes to you.

Deepak Chopra

I hope readers will consider, especially in this age of the World Wide Web, that as miraculous as it is, we still need to be in the same room with all five senses if we are to empathize with each other. Gloria Steinem

I don’t remember the exact point in time because at the beginning I didn’t attach much importance to this information. It must have been toward the end of the 1980s when Marco, my husband, mentioned various times that it was by then possible to correct even severe visual impairment through surgery. He had read that Russian surgeons had developed a treatment that enabled patients with complex vision problems and even blind people to see.

“And how do they reach that?”

“If I got it right”, replied Marco, “they extract the patient’s own lenses with the help of particular devices and replace them by plastic lenses.”

My skepticism remained, even though the news should have given me a glimmer of hope. For outsiders, my rather hostile attitude is certainly difficult to comprehend, because I was severely visually impaired since birth. Long ago, I had reconciled myself to my blindness. Certainly, many things were awkward and time-consuming, and I was dependent on outside help, especially from Marco. But I was sufficiently compensated for this—at least in my view. My other senses, especially hearing and touch, were far more developed than with many people in possession of their sight.1 And they still are: Even nowadays, when preparing a pizza, I don’t limit myself to have a look through the window of the oven. I open it and orient myself to the smell and above all to the sizzle. I pay most attention to what I hear, that is to the heartbeat of the pizza.

The better development of the existing senses is due to the fact that parts of the brain that are actually designed for seeing take over other tasks in the neural network. Almost all persons born blind or those who went blind at an early age report this phenomenon which is confirmed by a steadily growing number of neurobiologists. For example, Beau Lotto describes the case of a blind boy who uses so-called echolocation to orient himself: He manages to identify individual surroundings and objects by clicking his tongue. Because of the echo, he knows where he is and what objects are in front of him.2

Until that time, I had not wished to be able to see. To put it clearly, I never gave it a thought. Many years later, I noticed on the basis of some inquiries that I was no exception. Most people who had been blind since birth and those who had lost their sight very early felt no shortage and were doing quite well in everyday life.3 As an example, the story of Saliya Kahawatte, a German whose father came from Senegal, may serve. In his novel Mein Blind Date mit dem Leben (My Blind Date with Life), which was turned into a movie in 2017, he tells in detail how he managed over years to hide his severe visual impairment, a retinal detachment, from his environment.4 For me it was easy to identify myself with his narratives, because I had developed similar behaviors. I avoided talking to outsiders—that is all those whom I had no regular contact with—about my vision problems. What for? Would they really have understood my particular difficulties? How might they have treated me after my confession? When he suffers a severe breakdown Kahawatte decides to deal overtly with his blindness. He is quite successful in arranging his private as well as his professional life. He writes that he is at peace with himself, reaches his goals and enjoys every day.5

A similar mindset requires will-power and perseverance. At various times well-intentioned caretakers tried to convince Saliya Kahawatte to work in the fabrication of brooms, the usual occupation of blind people. Even nowadays you can find ads on the internet that offer brushes and brooms handmade by blind people. Saliya resisted successfully. He traces similar advices back to the fact that sighted people very rarely are able to put themselves in the position of a blind person, mainly because they lack the necessary contacts.

As indicated above I can identify quite well with what he himself is telling. In his private life he keeps his vision problems even nowadays mostly to himself—for various reasons. The main reason is the insecurity most sighted people manifest when in contact with a blind person. When he says: ‘I’m visually impaired’ or ‘I’m almost blind’ they don’t know how to deal with his revelation. They react upset, full of compassion, with sadness or deeply embarrassed. They want to help, but show it in an awkward manner. Most of them are tensed up. He doesn’t want to blame them for their behavior; there are many reasons for it. It is caused by the fact that sighted and blind persons don’t have occasion to meet. They are separated since childhood; they frequent different schools, often even different nursery schools. He considers this as plain madness.6

Unfortunately, inclusive schooling of children who are visually impaired or suffer from an impairment of one of the other senses remains wishful thinking despite the UN Disability Rights Convention. Most schools lack the necessary preconditions or equipment. In consequence there are quite curious misjudgments of sighted people with regards to the blind. A blind blogger, a man at the beginning of his forties, tells about a memorable encounter in a subway-train in Munich.7 A younger woman gets seated in front of him and converses with him about his personal conditions. All at once, the lady asks him in the overcrowded train quite loud: “Tell me, please, do blind people have sex?” The other passengers seated or standing near them prick up their ears. The blind blogger, acquainted to this type of questions, answers without reserve: “Sure, if you want to, we can try it out immediately.” No wonder that the woman does not reply, but leaves the train at the next stop.

In general, it is not astonishing that only very few people who were born blind or went blind in their early childhood consider surgery, even though quite difficult interventions have become more and more successful in the 21st century. Saliya Kahawatte, too, sees no necessity to take an operation into account. Following his feelings, an intervention would be nothing but stress. Perhaps the newly reached vision together with his extraordinarily developed touch, hearing and taste would give him the total insight. He finds this idea quite bizarre.8

Much further than Kahawatte goes Isaac Lidsky, the CEO of a great U.S. enterprise. At the beginning of a TED Talk, Lidsky exposes five assumptions about his person asking the public to reflect which ones are true and which ones are invented.9 The fourth assumption is: ‘I lost my sight caused by a rare, genetically motivated eye disease.’ As Lidsky shows no signs of blindness—he opens his blind person’s cane only later on—many of the participants are convinced that he could not be blind. Already this beginning of his talk proves the exceptional attitude of Lidsky toward his stroke of fate.

When he was diagnosed with a genetically caused eye disease for which no promising therapy existed, he was twelve years old. About ten years passed until he got totally blind. That delay gave him time to reflect on what sight really means. For most people seeing is immediate and effortless. You open your eyes and you see the surrounding world. To see means to believe; it is equated with the truth or with reality. Many experts trace this back to the fact that the evolution has predestined us to give the priority to seeing. Encyclopedias of anatomy indicate that about 70 % of our ordinary perception is based on vision. That is right, of course, as long as you do not question these findings. Seeing is not everything. You can deduce this, as mentioned, from the fact that the brain of people born blind partly changes its functions. With me, too, parts of the neural network assumed functions which otherwise were reserved for eyesight.

Through the years, Lidsky stated that what we see is not the universal truth; it is not the objective reality. It corresponds instead to a unique and personal virtual reality constructed in an extraordinary way by our brain. From Lidsky’s point of view, seeing is an illusion that was destructed by and by as his sight diminished. Everybody is creating his own reality. To confirm his convictions, he mentions Helen Keller, the deafblind American civil-rights activist. She writes that much worse than blindness is the lack of vision. By the way, the quote from The Little Prince of Saint-Exupéry chosen as title for this chapter continues as you know: What is essential is invisible to the eye.

There is no doubt that Lidsky is an exception. He does not consider the loss of his eyesight as a restriction; on the contrary, to him, his blindness constitutes a personal enrichment. This attitude can be explained by the fact that his psychological immune system is extremely well developed.10 It protects an individual against the experience of negative emotions. Unconsciously, information gets ignored, transformed and reconstructed so that a disastrous event might seem more bearable for the person concerned. As visual feedback does not reach Lidsky, his environment, especially his staff members, are obliged to give him verbal feedback. His disability forces them to say what they think and to avoid ambiguity. He communicates with them on a deeper level, and above all: His team knows that their point of view really counts.

Considering the cases of Kahawatte and Lidsky which are representative for many other visually impaired people, you can state that surgery does only make sense when there is a psychological strain. The wish to gain sight, however, is not very strong with many persons born blind. Of course, there are also things that blind people would like to see. Mike May, who lost his eyesight in an accident as a child, missed nothing in his life as a blind man.11 Nevertheless, he would have liked to see a landscape panorama and especially beautiful women with his own eyes. When he is successfully operated on in the middle of his life—it is a stem cell transplantation—, he has difficulties with facial recognition and perspective vision, which apparently still exist.12 As we will see below, others have even more serious problems with their newly acquired sense of sight. In some cases, successful surgery can even have highly negative consequences, including suicide.

The spectrum would not be complete, if I omitted another example of how a blind person dealt with his or her blindness. Saliya Kahawatte, as we have seen, takes his severe visual impairment without excitement and shapes his life following his conceptions. Isaac Lidsky considers his blindness even as gain as it permits him a deeper communication with his environment, especially in his professional life. He even seems to take pleasure in the stroke of fate that hit him unexpectedly. Some people, furthermore, have a special talent to learn from setbacks and take them as motivation to outreach for greater achievement. We can draw the conclusion that they learn from their mistakes. They surpass themselves. Without doubt there are people with such a growth-mindset not only among sighted, but also among blind persons.13

Another interesting example which I got to know later on is Andy Holzer, an Austrian born blind, who conquered the seven highest mountains in the world since the turn of the millennium. Already as a child he dreamed to climb Mount Everest someday, what by then no blind person had succeeded in doing. In 2014 he and his team were forced to abandon the ascent because of an avalanche accident. In the following year, Holzer had to finish a new attempt early because of a catastrophic earthquake. Somebody might assume that Holzer interpreted these failures as a sign to desist from tempting the fate. Far from it! On May 21, 2017 Holzer succeeded with two partners in ascending Everest up to the summit. Asking him about his perseverance you will discover that it was exactly the setbacks which encouraged him to insist. The account of his adventures is entitled: My Everest.14 With this title, he underlines that he has not simply climbed Mount Everest as many others before him. It is the particular challenge that was associated for him with the ascent. The reader of his book gets the impression that he considers setbacks to be part of everything—they seem to inspire him.

For myself, I was and I am far away from such extraordinary, admirable behavior. But at least I began to take surgery into account. I had enough time to weigh the pros and cons. Italian friends draw our attention to a Russian surgeon who operated near Milano. We decided to consult him in any case. After intense examinations he came to the conclusion that my chances of success were about fifty fifty. For that reason, he advised against the intervention. In case of failure it could be that I descended in complete darkness.

Quite often sighted people imagine that the world of a blind person is completely dark. But that is rarely the case. Nevertheless, only few people ask if a blind person sees anything and if so, what he or she is able to see. This is another proof for the awkwardness mentioned by Kahawatte that many sighted persons display in contact with the blind or visually impaired.

This is the main reason why I still remember the following conversation. At the beginning of our friendship Alina, the cousin of a schoolmate, asked me:

“What do you really see?”

I thought for a moment how to explain it to her, and then I said:

“My vision is quite blurred, as through dense fog. My world isn’t completely dark, but I don’t see colors. For me distance begins after an inch. I don’t perceive any objects that are further away.”

“So, you are very short-sighted. About how many diopters?”

I liked this concrete question very much. I would have been angry at an expression of compassion, surely without showing it.

“About 15 diopters. The right eye is somewhat more, the left a bit less.”

“I have heard that very short-sighted persons often suffer from cataract.”

“Yes, I was born with it; and there are some smaller malformations I’m not quite informed about.”

The eye cataract often made me see double images or a halation around the objects. Beyond that, I had great problems with spatial orientation and distances, but I was able to orient myself roughly. I tried to find positive aspects in all that. Then I saw the moon just with a light around it two or three times: ‘Gute Monde, ihr geht so stille …!’ (‘Good moons, you are going so quietly…!’)

2 Best of Elvis

Tactile navigation—the kinesthetic moving/touching of the body—is the total embodied awareness of a body in an environment. Knowledge is made corporeal with the sense of touch replacing that of sight as the primary mode of data gathering.

Neil Lewis

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Cecilia! Cecilia!”15 Someone shouted my name from the opposite platform. I immediately recognized David by his voice even though we had not been in touch for many years. Just in this moment my train arrived. I had not even the time to call out to him my email address.

Among my schoolmates, I preferred David for many reasons. Two years older than me, he was preparing for the Abitur, the university-entrance diploma at the end of secondary school. Whenever possible, he accompanied me to school. He usually was waiting for me in front of his parents’ house. In order to facilitate my orientation, he talked to me from a distance. But he never picked me up at my home. Later on, I understood that he did not want to limit my independence where it was not necessary. Where I could arrive on my own, he let me do so. At the beginning, he pointed out to me the greatest obstacles on our more than two kilometers long way to school. “You have to be careful here! They have not yet mended the pavement!” As time went by, he limited his hints more and more. Above all, he never made me feel helpless. On the contrary, he invited me to try out some little experiments. How proud I was, when I could take two stair steps at once, first upwards and then even downwards!

I considered it another merit of David that he never touched me as most others did. Under the pretext of helping me, they took me by my hand, touched my arm or grabbed me by the hips. They did not notice my reluctance. Perhaps I did not show my discomfort clearly enough because all in all I had to be grateful for any kind of help. Probably, I myself was the cause of the unwanted physical contact. I always felt the need to explore everyone and everything by touch as most blind and visually impaired persons do. Furthermore, you cannot suppress touch which makes you feel things and persons around you, but also your own body.

Although I knew David quite well, I only had a vague idea of his appearance. Of course, I asked my male and female friends about it. I always invited them to describe the persons in my environment, above all the boys. “You know, he looks really great, tall and slim, with dark curls and a fitting face,” Alina told me about her cousin. Somehow, I was able to make sense of this description.

From the past years a memorable afternoon in David’s apartment came often to my mind. It was the beginning of the hype around Elvis Presley. As with most of us, I liked his songs. But I did not manage to imitate the swing of his hips because the descriptions of my classmates and friends remained too vague. I had already difficulties with the hula-hoops that came into fashion at that time. Finally, I managed to move it around my hips. But there was the hoop. When it fell down, I had to keep on trying.

I told David about my wish to imitate Elvis’ hip swing: “You know, they don’t describe it exactly enough. What does that mean: one hip up, meanwhile the other one goes down and you lift the respective knee simultaneously and move it inwards?” Impossible to imagine if you had not seen it. One of Elvis’ managers—and he was able to see—is reported to have said: “I don’t know how you do it, but continue to do so!”

On our way home, David said to me one day: “If you want, you can come upstairs with me. I’ll show you how to do it.” That was an offer! David’s parents were both at work. We were alone in the apartment and could turn up the record player as loud as we wanted. Above all, I was sure that David never would have done anything against my will. But even today I don’t know if I would not have enjoyed it. At the time, I was almost seventeen years old. And, above all, body contact was much more important for me than for people in possession of their eyesight.

So, we went upstairs to David’s apartment. As soon as he opened the door, I heard the chirping of birds.

“Robins in a cage, how awful! Why did you never tell me about it?”

“How do you know that they’re robins?”

“My grandfather taught me during our walks. As I could not see the birds, I should at least recognize them by their chirping.”

“That’s fantastic! Yes, they’re robins, but they are not ours. We only have to care about them. A friend of my mother is on vacation.”

We drank a Coke. Then David put the first record on the player. I immediately recognized the sounds of Love me tender.

“Why not Jailhouse Rock?” I wanted to know.

“It is much too fast! We have to practice first. We’ll improve bit by bit.”

David was following a plan and that was a good thing!

After a few beats David took my hands and put them on his hips. With care, he moved them slowly up and down. Then he put my hands on his knees.

“When you move your right hip up, you bend your left leg inwards.”

“What does that mean: bend inwards?”

“You move it to the middle and bend it slightly. You have to put your foot on top. Did anybody ever tell you that Elvis always wears white socks to emphasize the position?”

No one had ever told me that before, why should they? I tried to imagine the movement. After a while it worked somehow. But it wasn’t easy to adapt the whole process to the rhythm of the music. David never got tired of making the same movements over and over again. Finally, I was ready.

“I think I can try it now.”

Love Me Tender sounded for the fifth time. David put his hands on my hips. Up and down, turning his knees alternately inwards.

When I could do it to David’s satisfaction, we increased the speed with Don’t Be Cruel. Then Teddy Bear followed. The others would be amazed when they saw how well I was able to do it now.

“So, when’s Jailhouse Rock coming?”

“First we have to perfect the whole thing. But soon we will.”

In my eyes David was the perfect teacher. I had told him that before. But he fended me off.

“If you mean to say that I’m quite capable of relating to others, then perhaps you’re right. … but I never want to be a teacher.”

“Why not? The students would learn a lot from you. You know what’s important.”

“That may be. But in a classroom, you can’t respond to each individual student in the way you need to. Besides, there are the curricula. Or do you learn what you really want to learn from Mrs. Siebert and Mr. Dahlmann? And do they teach it the way that suits you best?”

I hadn’t really thought about it. All in all, I was very satisfied with my teachers. They had never tried to send me to a school for disabled. Special schools for visually impaired or blind students like today did not exist at that time.16 Moreover, blindness was not as much of a problem in the post-war years as it is today, because many soldiers had returned home blind from the battles.

I still clearly remember Mrs. Melzer, my very first teacher in primary school. She had been reactivated for teaching at the age of 70, because there were hardly any teachers immediately after the war. Of course, she had heard about my visual impairment, but she never said a word about it. She always found time to spell the new words with her index finger in my hand, so that I gradually got an idea of the writing. When she came along and took my wrist, I knew that I had to open my hand. Then she wrote the respective letter with her finger or a tiny stick in the palm of my hand. And she urged Renate, a neighbor’s child, to spell and read out all the new words to me several times. In return, I helped Renate with the arithmetic problems. Like most visually impaired people, I could imagine abstract things quite well.

Mrs. Melzer—by the way, she insisted that we addressed her as ‘Fräulein’—was quite modern from the point of view of that time. There were almost no schoolbooks. Whenever possible, she did not content herself with descriptions or blackboard drawings, but brought a wide variety of objects into the classroom. While the others drew the objects in their notebooks and wrote the corresponding word next to them, I was allowed to touch, move back and forth and sometimes even smell the objects in peace!

As the electricity often failed, we did not have to wait for the bell to ring at the end of the lesson. Mrs. Melzer was free in the timing. Furthermore, she had a fairly precise idea of our learning possibilities. The lessons were tailored to our individual needs, and when we had done our daily workload, we were allowed to go home. As I was dependent on Renate, I tried as best I could to help her with the tasks that were difficult for her.

“Well, David, my primary school teacher was very responsive to each of us. The good ones got more challenging tasks, while she dealt with the weaker ones.”

“You were very lucky. By the way, in the first years after the war, not everything was as regulated as it is today. It was no different with me. Our Mr. Lehmann, already high in his seventies, was empathy in person. But today …”

“Do you know what you want to become?”

“Yes, for over a year now. I’m going to study psychology; later on, I’ll open a practice. I’ve already chosen the suitable university.”

“Which one?”

“I want to study in Mainz; I have even enrolled.”

“Already? You still have time until you graduate.”

“Yes, but as most universities they have long waits in psychology.”

Finally, it was the turn of Jailhouse Rock. First David controlled my movements, then we rocked independently. I was very delighted. But soon I lost, as so often, the sense for the right direction. Without intent I landed on David’s body like in a hug. And what did David do? He grabbed me gently but decisively by my upper arms and pushed me away. I muttered something about apologizing.

“No problem. That can happen.”

Before I could reply anything, we heard someone unlock the apartment door. David’s father came into the room.

“Hello, Cecilia, how nice of you to come upstairs.”

“Yes, David taught me the hip swing of Elvis. I can do it pretty well now.”

“Fine, that’s really vital these days!” He laughed. “Well, don’t let me interrupt you. I have to finish an urgent report for tomorrow.”

We made one or two more attempts with Teddy Bear, but somehow the air was out. Finally, I said goodbye and David brought me downstairs to the front door.

The experience worried me. In the following days I thought about it a lot. But it wasn’t like a missed opportunity. No, it was something quite different. The insignificant event brought me to the question that I often asked myself: What did I look like? What effect did my appearance have on others? Was I attractive? I asked everyone again and again—my family, our acquaintances, my friends. They described me as tall, slim, blond, with green eyes. But that did not answer my basic question: How did I appear to the opposite sex? Moreover, I was aware that probably nobody would have confronted me with the truth. Who would tell an almost blind girl that she was not particularly attractive? Was a visually impaired person not punished enough?

I kept thinking about this. What would a girl look like, that David could fall in love with? I could hardly imagine. The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that I had never heard of a girl in connection with David.

At my next opportunity I interviewed Alina. I thought my question was very clever:

“Tell me, do you know David’s girlfriend?”

“What do you mean?” Alina returned baffled.

“Well, if he has a girlfriend, then you surely know her.”

“David never had a girlfriend.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you guess?” came another counter-question from Alina.

“Do you want to say he is not interested in girls?”

“Exactly. Haven’t you noticed that David is almost exclusively with boys?”

Even thinking about it carefully, I had never noticed that. When we met in the schoolyard, it was always David who came up to me to have a chat. How could I have noticed that he had previously only been with male schoolmates? I explained it to Alina who immediately apologized:

“How stupid of me! Please excuse me. But while we are on the subject: May I ask you something?”

“Oh, sure.” I was curious.

“How do you find out that you like someone? I mean, a man.”

“There are many reasons. First of all, I always listen carefully to what he says and how he says it.”

“OK, then you’ll know if he’s a smart guy or a blather. So what?”

“The most important thing is the voice. Does it have a sound that somehow attracts me, that sets off a vibration in me. Breathing is also important. Does it go together with what he says?”

Alina was really the optimal conversation partner for me. This was confirmed by her next question:

“Do you mean to say that you soon notice if someone is lying or telling the truth? If someone is honest?”

“Sort of.”

“I never thought about that. I suppose there are other qualities one can’t really do anything about, but which are important to you.”

“Yes, the body odor is also important, or more precisely the body heat that one radiates. I also find soft hair on the arms very erotic.”

“Fantastic!” Alina was pleased.

“But you must not forget the disadvantages: I never know how old someone is or what he looks like.”

“Don’t let it bother you. You’ll come to know as time goes by. You only have to ask someone. Me, for example!”

“Thank you. I’ll take you at your word.”

“I’ll be pleased. Maybe I’ll like him too.” She laughed.

3 Blind is the one who refuses to see

Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.

Ayn Rand

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

José Saramago

After our return from Italy, the next medical consultation was only a matter of time. But: Did I really want to undergo eye surgery? That was what I asked myself again and again. As I said, I had reconciled myself to my severe visual impairment decades ago. But that did not mean that I was not missing some things. In this respect, I was different from Saliya Kahawatte and Isaac Lidsky, who considered their lives fulfilled even without eyesight. The more I thought about it, the more I noticed certain shortcomings.

Two matters in particular kept coming to my mind. On the one hand, I would have liked to be independent of other people. Although those who helped me did not show at all the possible burden, I would have liked to plan my time independently from other people. I often had to orientate myself according to the time possibilities of my helpers. On the other hand, I sometimes felt that communication with friends and acquaintances was insufficient. In one-on-one communication most of them took my possibilities into account; they tried to formulate their thoughts clearly and unambiguously. In conversations with friends or acquaintances, however, I often had difficulty following the conversation: I had to assign voices, make sense of pauses in speech and, above all, interpret the individual statements without being able to orient myself by facial expressions and gestures. I was convinced that I would be able to follow the conversations better if I saw the individual speakers.

Of course, I also thought about the failure of the intervention, but I did not really fear it. The prudent behavior of the Russian surgeon had shown me that the ophthalmologists who wanted to test the new procedure did not do so without consideration, if only to avoid setting negative precedents right at the beginning. Whether or not I would have thought of a corresponding operation without the intervention of my husband, I do not know. Probably I would not have found out about the new procedures so early. But my husband was certainly right: Why shouldn’t I expand my four senses to include the visual sense? Thus, I decided to try vision if there was a promising possibility.

The most urgent question I had to ask myself in this context was rather: What would it be like if I suddenly saw? I could not get an idea of it. I would have liked to exchange views with other people concerned, but there was nobody in my environment who could have told me anything about it. Even my eye doctor, whom I visited now and then, remained silent. Although he welcomed my intention to undergo surgery, he had no first-hand experience. In his practice there was no case comparable to mine. Therefore, I questioned my husband, who had informed himself in detail.

“I find it rather difficult to suddenly be able to see when you don’t know what seeing is.”

My husband did not play down the difficulties, but said:

“Yes, it’s certainly one of the greater challenges. I have read a lot about it. You need a strong will and quite a lot of perseverance, especially in the beginning. You really have to learn how to see.”

Not satisfied I dug deeper:

“And what if it doesn’t work? Are there any patients for whom seeing was not an enrichment, who failed to learn to see?”

“Yes, but unfortunately, there is a lack of solid, recent evidence. It is reported that many people who underwent cataract therapy have not been able to cope with seeing. This may have been partly due to outdated surgical procedures.”

“And what happened to them? Have they gone blind again?”

“No, not that, at least as far as I know. But a relatively large number committed suicide.”

“Oh dear,” I exclaimed in dismay.

But my husband knew how to calm me down.

“With all of this, you must remember that they were often reluctant for, or at least indifferent to, the operation. And they were not aware that one must learn to see. They made no effort whatsoever. Moreover, some of them suffered from serious illnesses even before the operation. I am convinced that if you don’t give in to the illusion from the beginning that seeing comes naturally, you will succeed. You have to do something about it.”

“If I understood you correctly, it’s definitely very hard to conquer the visual world.”

“Aptly put! But I will assist you in conquest when the time comes.”

You might ask now: Don’t you just have to open your eyes and see? Or is it a kind of Sleeping Beauty who is kissed awake by a prince? Since Sleeping Beauty is known to have seen the world until she was 15, it was only a kind of time travel after that the well-known fairytale figure had to find the connection to the here and now. This is not an easy task either, but not to be compared with the effort one has to make when, blind from birth, starts seeing in adulthood.

My husband had further explanations at the ready:

“There is a big difference between congenital and acquired visual impairment. It is quite different if you have seen more or less well all your life and then gradually lose your sight as you get older, due to cataracts or other age-related eye diseases.”

“Does this mean that after cataract surgery, such patients do not need to learn to see because they return to a previous positive state?”

“Exactly that.”

After a few years, doctors in Germany also performed comparable operations, usually with good to very good success. A colleague had heard about a clinic in the Rhineland through his daughter—she studied eye medicine—whose chief physician had already successfully operated on several severely visually impaired and even blind patients. In the meantime, he was known far beyond the German-speaking countries. We went to see him and he approved the intervention. Although I was already in my late forties, the operation, which I will describe in more detail later, brought the desired success, also because the retina of both eyes was largely intact.

After the successful surgery, friends and acquaintances congratulated me without exception. “This must be like winning the lottery for you” or: “Now your life really begins.” They simply could not imagine how difficult it is, to learn how to see if one has been blind or at least severely visually impaired since birth or early childhood. They had no idea of the effort required to process optical impressions in a reasonable and meaningful way. The main reason for the difficulties is that people who were born blind or severely visually impaired cannot rely on experiences that help sighted people process incoming visual impressions. The moment when the nurses removed the bandages from my eyes was only the first stage on my arduous journey from darkness to light.

Years later, a friend gave me a book entitled An Anthropologist on Mars.17 The author is the late British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who describes complex clinical pictures in his numerous popular science books with the intention of not losing sight of the people concerned and of recognizing the individual circumstances behind each illness. He accepts long journeys in order to visit the patients in their home environment and to interact with them privately. But Sacks does not go beyond the role of the benevolent observer. After all, he is a doctor and therefore primarily interested in clinical pictures.

In the mid-1990s, Sacks reported that in the last few centuries up to the 1980s, there were only about a dozen people who were freed from their blindness by a successful operation at an advanced age, or better: who came to see. Thus, in one of the seven episodes of the aforementioned book, he describes the case of Virgil, who was successfully operated on in the same year as myself, that is in 1991.18 Although Virgil and I were about the same age at the time of the surgery, our stories were very different.

One reason for this is the initial situation: Virgil was not only severely visually impaired, but was considered to be completely blind. In addition, he had numerous serious pre-existing medical conditions. Above all, however, he was indifferent, if not hostile, to the operation that his fiancée had urged him to undergo. Virgil did practice, for example with toys, to be able to classify objects better. But one has to deal with the same perceptions in reality over and over again until the brain can interpret the visual input accurately and assign meaning to it. It seems as if learning by doing had been an enormous psychological burden for Virgil. I also found it difficult to repeat the same processes—with slight variations—several times, but it was manageable, especially when I could see progress. Above all, however, I was aware that it was a matter of building a new identity if you did not want to become a blind person who could see. Ultimately, the psychological disposition is decisive.19

Sacks is primarily interested in medical and psychological facts; he visits Virgil in his hometown together with a colleague in order to question him and perform a series of tests. In my opinion, the conclusions he draws from the cases presented in the literature are too negative. Sacks is always talking about the patients’ problems with their newly acquired sense of sight. It is possible that only the problematic cases were recorded, because Alberto Valvo (1972) proves that there were also positive developments: “Once our patients have acquired visual patterns, and can work with them autonomously, they seem to experience great joy in visual learning … a renaissance of personality … They start thinking about wholly new areas of experience.”20

How I gradually succeeded in bringing the sense of sight in line with other sensory experiences is explained in the following with the help of numerous details, especially those that are particularly relevant for an adequate assessment of eyesight. As far as I know, I am the first to tell you about these strenuous learning processes, including the setbacks, but also the small and large successes, at first hand. Although there are numerous publications dealing with blindness in literature and visual arts21, they cannot be compared with my experiences. In addition, there are the descriptions of blind people themselves. Similar to Helen Keller, most of them report on how they deal with their blindness.

I became acquainted with these reports and stories over time, because when I had completed the literacy course without much problems—also thanks to the prudence of my former primary school teacher—friends and acquaintances overwhelmed me with books written by blind people and about blindness in general.

I was particularly impressed by the description of the French writer Jacques Lusseyran, who went blind at the age of eight. Nevertheless, he joined the French resistance movement during the Second World War. After his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp, he published several books. A distant relative had given me his book And there was light: The extraordinary Memoir of a blind hero of the French Resistance in World War II.22

Little by little I also received the literary works of sighted authors, such as The Country of the Blind by Herbert George Wells from the beginning of the 20th century23 or The City of the Blind by José Saramago from the 1990s24, in which blindness is mainly used as a metaphor. However, none of these books has impressed me as much as Lusseyran’s. If you have had to struggle with blindness yourself, you can empathize very well with the story of a blind person.

To my knowledge, there is no autobiographical work to date that tells the story of how tiring, but also how satisfying and rewarding it is to learn to see after decades of blindness or severe visual impairment. Even the book Blinder Galerist (Blind Gallery-Owner) by Johann König does not change this.25 The report that König, son of the well-known art connoisseur and museum director Kasper König, wrote together with Daniel Schreiber, inevitably bears similarities to the descriptions of other blind or visually impaired authors.

But his case is quite different. When Johann König became almost completely blind in the early 1990s due to an accident while playing with a starting pistol, he was already twelve years old. Up to this point, he had intensive contact with visual impressions through his father: Kasper König took him already as a toddler to exhibitions and the museums he directed. The 30-page picture section inside the book bears witness to this. At home, Johann was also surrounded by art connoisseurs and above all by well-known painters and sculptors, who regularly visited the König family—mother Edda was also interested in art. Johann’s sense of sight was therefore already very well developed at the time of the accident.

In the two years after the accident, Johann was operated on more than 30 times, sometimes with minor successes, which never lasted long. Finally, he attended the well-known German Institute for the Blind (BLISTA) in Marburg, where it was now possible to take the Abitur, the qualification granted at the end of secondary school. Living in a boarding school with other blind children and young people was an enrichment for him, as he was able to determine his own life to a large extent—unlike at home. When he had to realize that he would be denied a career as an artist, he decided to open a gallery.

In 2002, shortly before his high school graduation, he founded a gallery called Johann König, Berlin, which was initially in the red, but within five years became one of the most important international galleries for modern art. After innumerable further operations, a special corneal transplantation procedure finally leads to a remarkable success in 2007. König recovers 30–40% of his sight. He describes his joy and relief, but has no difficulty whatsoever with his regained vision. The main focus of his book is on modern art, the art business and especially on his professional activity as a gallery-owner. These descriptions make up more than seventy percent of the text. König’s message is: Even with such serious limitations, you can make it! He substantiates this statement with numerous quotes from recent literature. Johann König is not a blind gallery-owner; he was blind when he founded his gallery and ran it with a team of employees from 2002 to 2007, the year of his most successful operation to date.

Up to now nobody before me has ever described what learning to see means for the assessment of the sense of sight and the perception of each individual. The fact that I have largely succeeded in learning to see is certainly due to the fact that I was not completely blind, but could distinguish light from dark. On the other hand, I would not have come so far without the empathy and support of my husband. Oliver Sacks also reports on the corresponding learning processes, using Virgil as an example, but at second hand. In addition, Sacks takes on the role of the observer, as already mentioned. He shows great understanding for Virgil, but, like all the patients he describes, he does not give him any psychological help. Yet appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment should have been offered long ago—in connection with this kind of surgery.

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