A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (53 page)

And so this beautiful photograph is also a disturbing piece of evidence, of the power that he developed to hide his illness behind an innocent face. When he posed with a smile for Teresa’s camera in Café Kreipe on Monday 9 November, it would appear that he had already decided to kill himself the following day.

A goalkeeper is trained all his life to give no sign of despair, disappointment or fear. That ability always to appear in control of things helped Robert to live on when depression took hold of him. And that gift became his fate when the illness led him to seek his own death: he concealed his intentions so well that no one could help him any longer.

Afterwards, lots of newspapers mistakenly used the German word
Freitod
– literally, ‘free death’. The death of a depressive is never a free decision. The illness narrows perception to the extent that the sufferer no longer knows what it means to die. He thinks it just means getting rid of the illness.

How exactly depression comes about has still not been definitively investigated. The illness is rarely triggered by a single clear cause; sometimes the reason for its arrival remains unexplained. Some people become depressed every winter; many people, like Robert Enke, are affected only occasionally, for brief phases of their lives.

Ewald Lienen, who was closer to Robert than most people in the world of football, rang Jörg Neblung after his death and asked, bewildered, ‘Why did I never notice anything?’ The simple answer is: because when he was working with Lienen on a daily basis Robert was free of the symptoms of the illness. He suffered from depression twice in his life, in 2003 and 2009. At all other times he was just as we saw him, a warmhearted person who believed that humility isn’t a bad character trait, even for a goalkeeper.

His death hit home to so many people not least because they felt that the values he believed in, such as solidarity and consideration for others, were often denied him in the world of professional football. Robert suffered from this, as do many other footballers who notice that certain coaches – and even more than the coaches, the public – see concern or empathy as a weakness in a footballer. ‘I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that,’ shouted Robert when he was wound up once again by the idea that his style of play went unacknowledged because he wasn’t a fierce goalkeeper who trod a solitary and reckless path. Clearly too few people were willing to grasp that Robert was something better: a goalkeeper with a powerful jump and uncommon reflexes who didn’t make a spectacle of his virtues and who firmly believed that ambition could be realised politely and respectfully.

As so often in November in Empede, the colours of nature looked faded when he was buried. The brownness of the fields and the bare trees looked flat under the grey sky. When the funeral in the little monastery church of Mariensee was over, it started raining. Standing in the cemetery, without a jacket, without an umbrella, dressed only in Benfica’s thin club suit, was José Moreira. Rain dripped from his black hair, and turned his light-coloured suit dark grey. The sight of him was a reminder of how unprepared all of us had been, in every respect, for Robert’s death.

Confronted with the subject of depression, most people realised that they had at best a vague idea of the illness. So
there
was much talk of how Robert’s tragic fate should be used to strip the illness of its taboos. Because many depressives still don’t know they’re suffering from the illness. Symptoms like a lack of drive and sleeplessness are often interpreted as purely physical suffering. It would be too much to hope that the illness will be better understood all of a sudden, but perhaps this book will do something to help depressives find more sympathy and understanding.

The last photograph of Robert blurs before my eyes, and so many other images come flooding back.

Robert sitting on the terrace of his holiday home in Portugal. He loved sitting out in the open when night fell and a pleasantly cool feeling settled on the skin after the heat of the day. On the mountain opposite, the Palácio da Pena gleamed in all its glory.

‘It’s so beautiful, you can only believe it if you say it out loud, over and over again: I’m sitting here on the terrace, looking at the Palácio da Pena.’

Teresa, who had heard this sentence dozens of times, blurted out, ‘You’re always on about your fantastic Palácio, but in ten years you haven’t managed even to go and take a look at it!’

It was July 2009, four months before his death, and he had so relaxed into the happy moment that even Teresa’s outburst amused him. He sought her hand. ‘We will take a look at the palace,’ he said. ‘We have our whole lives to do it.’

Apart from the interviewees quoted in the book, I would like to give cordial thanks to a number of other people who helped me with my work on Robert Enke’s biography: R
ü
diger Barth, Barbara Baumgartner, Matthias Cleef, Jan Döhling, Lotfi El Bousidi, Christoph Fischer, Max Geis, Rui Gomes, Thomas Häberlein, Karsten Kellermann, Christof Kneer, Birk Meinhardt, Jörg Nabert, Peter Penders, Cordula Reinhardt, Harald Stenger, Josep Miguel Terés, Daniel Valdivieso, Tino Zippel.

One quote from Robert Enke has been taken from interviews with Robert Mucha/
11 Freunde
, Michael Richter/
Kicker
, Matthias Sonnenberg/
Sport-Bild
and Katharina Wolf and Gregor Ruhmöller/
Bild Zeitung
. I have taken two quotes from Victor Valdés from a conversation with Michael Robinson for
Informe Robinson
.

As background literature I found the following useful: Josef Giger-B
ü
tler:
Sie haben es doch gut gemeint. Depression und Familie
, Beltz, 2010; Piet C. Kuiper:
Seelenfinsternis: Die Depression eines Psychiaters
, Fischer, 1995;
Psychologie Heute-compact
: ‘Depression. Die Krankheit unserer Zeit verstehen’; Thomas M
ü
ller-Rörich et al:
Schattendasein. Das unverstandene Leiden Depression
, Springer, 2007; Ursula Nuber:
Depression. Die verkannte Krankheit
, dtv, 2006.

I had problems with the question of how to deal with Robert Enke’s diaries. On the one hand they are a unique insight into the world of a depressive – and one of the intentions of this book is to help people understand what depression really is. On the other hand they are personal notebooks. My only clue lay in Robert’s wish that he talk about his illness himself, as
well
as something that he said to me in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in February 2004: ‘I’ve started taking some notes for our book.’

I’ve tried to pick individual passages out of his diaries which to my mind provide an impressive description of the illness. I have deliberately excluded passages that I see as too revealing, as well as (with one justified exception) remarks about other people. Which part of his diaries he would have published and which not, I will never know.

Ronald Reng

Barcelona, August 2010

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Published by Yellow Jersey Press 2011

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Copyright © Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich 2010
English translation © Shaun Whiteside, 2011

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First published as
Robert Enke: Ein allzu kurzes Leben
in 2010 by
Piper Verlag, Germany

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Yellow Jersey Press
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

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ISBN 9780224091657