A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke
Read A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Online
Authors: Ronald Reng
Three: Defeats Are His Victory
Seven: Ever Further, Ever Higher
Twelve: No Light, Not Even in the Fridge
Fourteen: There is Robert, There is No Goal
Seventeen: In the Land of Goalkeepers
Twenty: The Cheerfulness of Xylophones Silenced
Epilogue: The View of the Palace
Why does an international footballer with the world at his feet decide to take his own life?
On 10 November 2009 the German national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, stepped in front of a passing train. He was thirty two years old.
Viewed from the outside, Enke had it all. Here was a professional goalkeeper who had played for a string of Europe’s top clubs including Jose Mourinho’s Benfica and Louis Van Gaal’s Barcelona. Enke was destined to be his country’s first choice for years to come. But beneath the bright veneer of success lay a darker story.
In
A Life Too Short
, award-winning writer Ronald Reng pieces together the puzzle of his lost friend’s life. Reng brings into sharp relief the specific demands and fears faced by those who play top-level sport. Heartfelt, but never sentimental he tells the universal tragedy of a talented man’s struggles against his own demons.
Ronald Reng is the highly-acclaimed author of
The Keeper of Dreams: One Man’s Controversial Story of Life in the English Premiership
(Yellow Jersey Press), which won Biography of the Year at the 2004 British Sports Book Awards.
Also by Ronald Reng
The Keeper of Dreams
7: picture alliance/Sven Simon
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: private individuals
Through these balmy summer days, which seem made for ease and pleasure, the testing continues: what part is being tested he is no longer sure. Sometimes it seems he is being tested simply for testing’s sake, to see whether he will endure the test.
Youth
, J. M. Coetzee
‘I would like a poem,’ Teresa says, and for a second that lasts an eternity the house falls silent.
Robert looks quizzically at his wife to see if she really means it. Is he supposed to give her a poem for her birthday? ‘It’d be nice,’ Teresa adds casually, and thinks no more about it.
But he can’t get the idea out of his head.
It’s a few years since he last read a poem, let alone wrote one. He tries to remember. A poem, he thinks, has to rhyme; a good poem, he believes, is like a hint of a smile, with delicate humour between the lines. With that idea in his head, Robert starts writing.
Some afternoons he lies to Teresa, saying he’s going to his office for a while to go through tax documents or to complete some other paper-work. Then he sits down at his desk with a biro and a note-pad. His gaze drifts to the garden. The rear side of his office is one huge window; it gives him a feeling of wellbeing when the sunbeams fall on him in the spring. But now, in the winter, it’s less pleasant at his desk. The heating in the office is unreliable. Their house in Empede, on the flat terrain of Lower Saxony, is a converted farm. His office used to be the stable.
The words he puts down on the paper look bent and rough – he hardly ever uses his valuable goalkeeper’s fingers to write. But in his head the words start forming rhymes more and more quickly, and he’s filled with joy – not like the flood of happiness he experiences when he steers a difficult shot over the bar, quite gentle, but so intense that Robert has to keep on writing, in the office, in the hotel the evening before a
Bundesliga
match, on scraps of note-paper, on the backs of bills. Sometimes, if he has no paper to hand, he taps his ideas into his mobile phone. By the time the big day, 18 February 2009, arrives he has written 104 lines.
He wishes Teresa a happy birthday while they’re still in bed. When she goes to the bathroom he creeps into the hall and lets the dogs out. They have nine of them, and two cats. Teresa rescued them from the streets during their years in southern Europe. On her last birthday she’d wished for a pet pig. He’d decided to take it as a joke.
He lights candles in the living-room.
‘Let’s do the presents this afternoon, when we’ve got more peace,’ says Teresa when she comes in.
He shakes his head; it won’t take long. He asks her to sit down at the old farmhouse table, just for a moment. As he presses her gently into the chair by her shoulders he can’t help smiling with anticipation. Then he takes his place on the other side of the table.
He sets his poem down in front of him. But he speaks by heart.
For your birthday, what will it be?
A diamond, beautiful to see?
Perhaps a watch from the jeweller’s store?
It won’t be cheap, of that you can be sure.
And what about having a pig for a pet?
Robbi will put down his foot about that!
Cats, then, or horses, or maybe a dog?
No, please, stop it, my head’s in a fog.
So, for her birthday, what’s it to be?
Oh no, what she wants is a poem from me!
It isn’t too big, or too much, or too dear
Yet the very thought of it fills me with fear.
Teresa is struck dumb with joy. Verse by verse he presents her with her whole life: the move to Empede, her love of animals, even the death of their daughter Lara, who was born with a serious heart defect and died after an operation at the age of two.
Then Lara came with her imperfect heart –
That was something that tore us apart.
But she was strong, and even in pain
She still lived up to the family name.
When he’s finished, Teresa has tears in her eyes. She says only one sentence, ‘Please read it to me again.’
He starts again, at the beginning, all twenty-six verses, all 104 lines. At the end he says:
We can’t then help wondering what’ll come next
Along life’s long journey – it’s got me perplexed.
Will Grandpa stay, or will he not?
Are we going to move house? I don’t know a jot!
I won’t let things become too much of a worry –
The days soon pass, there is no great hurry.
Only one thing is certain, and this much is true;
The one thing is this: that I need and love you.
Robert Enke is thirty-one, the German national football team’s goalkeeper, strong, good-natured and happy. It will be the last birthday that Teresa celebrates with him.
On Tuesday, 10 November 2009, he calls ‘Hallo Ela!’ from the kitchen when the housekeeper arrives at nine o’clock. He gives his second daughter, Leila, ten months old, a kiss on the forehead and says goodbye to Teresa. On the magnetic board in the kitchen he has noted in felt-tip pen all the things that need doing, including a reminder to get four tickets for the Bayern Munich game. Then he’s out of the door. He has two individual
training
sessions today: in the morning with the fitness coach, in the afternoon with the goalkeeping coach of Hannover 96. He’ll be back at about half-past six, as always. That was what he said to Teresa.
But there’s no training arranged for this Tuesday.
I get through to him on his mobile in the car just after half-past twelve. I’m to pass on two requests: an English journalist friend of mine wants to interview him, and the German Olympic Sport Library wants to invite him as guest speaker to their annual conference in January. Hey, am I your secretary, passing on requests to you like this, I try to joke. But he’s abrupt on the phone. Of course, I think, he’s in the car between training sessions; he probably wants to get to lunch in the Espada or at Heimweh, as always. ‘I’ll call you back tonight, Ronnie, OK?’ he says. I can’t remember how he signed off.
That evening I only get calls from other people.
Robert Enke’s suicide on that cool autumn evening brought together people who were close to him and people who had never heard his name before in that state where you feel raw inside, as if you’ve been torn apart. In the days that followed, the sympathy often bordered on hysteria: the London
Times
devoted half of its front page to Robert Enke; in China, state television included him in the main news; the news agencies announced that the number of guests at his funeral was a record (‘more than at any funeral in Germany since Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s’). That Robert’s passing had assumed such dimensions could only be explained by the fact that these days everything, even death, becomes an event.
But beyond the headlines, deep down, there was real pain, a profound paralysis. Robert’s death reminded most of us how little we understand about the illness that is depression. The rest of us, in shockingly large numbers, were reminded of how difficult it is to speak about depression. Just like Robert, we had always thought we had to keep our illness or the illnesses of our families a secret.
The facts are regularly in the newspapers: more people die every day of depression-related suicide than in road accidents. But such figures don’t give us anything more than a vague idea that sadness is too hard for some people to bear. And if the headlines were bigger when celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or Ernest Hemingway killed themselves, that seemed somehow – even if people didn’t say it out loud – to have its own logic; artists do that kind of thing. Because isn’t melancholy, the dark side, an inevitable part of art?
But Robert Enke was Germany’s number one goalkeeper. The last bulwark, calm and cool in the tensest situations, able to control his stress and anxieties at the most extreme moments. Every weekend professional sportsmen like him play out the dream that everything is achievable; more than most footballers Robert gave the public the illusion that every obstacle could be overcome. At the age of twenty-nine he’d made it into the national side, having been unemployed after a first depression four years earlier and then stranded in the second division in Spain; after Lara’s death in 2006 he and Teresa had managed to find a life in parallel to their pain. And at a time when, outwardly at least, he seemed finally to have rediscovered happiness – a family with a daughter, as well as the prospect of being in goal for his country at the World Cup in South Africa – early in August 2009 the depression returned, worse than ever.