A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

by Reng, Ronald

  At Simon Rolfes’s wedding Robert went back into the banqueting hall in Haus Kambach and loudly drew in a breath, as he always did when he wanted to say something important. Then he said to Teresa, ‘René’s a really sound guy.’

  * * *

  On holiday in Portugal, after thirsting for action for a few days he started training for the 2009–10 campaign. It was to be the season of his life, involving a friendly duel for the number one position at the World Cup in South Africa. Like René he was confident that he could live with whatever decision Germany’s coaches made. But he was sure in a strange way that he would be in goal in South Africa.

  The Portuguese sun had left him tanned. Leila was on a blanket on the terrace. Bare-chested, he was doing press-ups over his daughter, and every time he lowered his body he gave her a kiss.

  NINETEEN

  The Black Dog

  ROBERT ENKE INVENTED THE kissing machine. He was sitting on the parquet floor in Jörg Neblung’s house in Cologne, lifting Jörg’s one-year-old daughter Milla gradually into the air with the jerky movements of a robot. ‘I am the kissing machine,’ he said to his godchild and went on bumpily working away until he had hoisted the child up in front of his face. There the machine concluded its programme with a smacker on the chops.

  Jörg watched them and thought how great Robert looked. He was wearing a white summer shirt, and his skin was bronze against it. He had interrupted his holiday in Lisbon to play a benefit game in Germany.

  ‘Again?’ he asked Milla, and the kissing machine started whirring into action.

  A month later Jörg saw Robert again. In July he travelled, with the image of the kissing machine in his head, to Carinthia where Hannover 96 were training for the new season. He found a sober-looking goalkeeper.

  ‘I don’t know what’s up. I’ve been feeling limp all day.’

  ‘That’s normal, Robbi, you’re getting old.’

  He would turn thirty-two in a few weeks.

  Jörg tried his best, but they couldn’t really get a decent conversation under way. They got stuck on the usual professional topics: disability insurance, René Adler, and the evergreen question of whether Hannover should play with one or two strikers. ‘This season we’re battling against relegation,’ Robert prophesied. Over the last few years the club had spent millions on players who hadn’t raised the team’s quality or lifted its mood. Now there was no money left for reinforcement, and Michael Tarnat, one of the founding fathers of Cabin Two, had ended his career.

  Jörg thought that Hannover’s bleak outlook programme might be oppressing Robert.

  ‘I’m always so tired,’ Robert said to Teresa on the phone.

  ‘You’re always tired at training-camp.’

  Hanno Balitsch noticed that Robert often withdrew to his room in the afternoon while the others stayed on the hotel terrace telling the old stories, like the one about how they’d covered Mille with eggs and feathers two years earlier. The jokes and the shop-talk with his team-mates had always been Robert’s favourite time of day. Often he’d imitated the well-known German television comedy character Stromberg.

  Even at training Robert now no longer really seemed to belong to the team. He practised alone a lot with goalkeeping coach Jörg Sievers. The World Cup season had begun and he was working hard on his game. But he still couldn’t understand why he always found it so hard to get out of bed in the morning.

  ‘The holidays were really stressful as well,’ he said when he rang Marco from his hotel room.

  Marco wondered for a moment: how could they have been stressful? When they’d seen each other on holiday in the Rhineland, Robert had told him how wonderful everything was.

  ‘In the last two weeks in Lisbon I was never properly able to rest. My brother was there, and there were arguments. Sick street dogs were running around the property and we had to take them to the vet, so that was another day gone, and because of the house we were constantly dealing with workmen of various kinds. But I’ll tell you about that in greater detail one day.’

  The exhaustion was still with him when he got back from Carinthia. He tried to ignore it.

  Andreas Köpke visited him at training in Hanover. The day before, Köpke had been with Tim Wiese in Bremen. A year before the World Cup Köpke wanted to give his keepers a few pointers on how they could improve their game. He had put together a DVD of scenes from matches to demonstrate his concept of the ideal goalkeeper. For Robert, one sequence featuring Chelsea’s goalkeeper Petr Cech was particularly interesting. For crosses, Cech stood in the middle of the goal, often a few yards in front of the goal-line; Robert stood much closer to the near post, and to the goal-line. ‘When you’re standing in the middle you can take down crosses aimed behind the goalkeeper or far into the penalty area, where you’d never get to otherwise,’ Köpke explained to him. Álvaro Iglesias, the second division keeper from Tenerife, had said exactly the same thing to him already five years earlier. Now that Germany’s goalkeeping coach had said it to him he tried out Cech’s approach during training.

  When he started the season on 2 August with a cup match against the Regionalliga West side Eintracht Trier, Robert was tense. He thought it was normal. But it was starting again.

  The Mosel Stadium in Trier had low terraces with light-blue corrugated-iron roofs, and wasn’t even sold out. At half-time Hannover were leading 1–0 and could have had two or three more goals. Trier drew strength from the narrow deficit – everything was still to play for. Excited by playing in the spotlight, the Regionalliga side went for it. A cross flew in towards the edge of the six-yard box in front of Robert. He saw Trier’s Martin Wagner sprinting for the ball and dashed out, spreading his arms to make the goal small. But Wagner had already equalised. No one holds a goalkeeper responsible for a goal like that – just the goalkeeper himself. He had got there too late. Four minutes later the score was 2–1. His defence, confused by the equaliser, had left Robert on his own against two Trier attackers.

  There was no getting around it: Trier, a team from the Fourth Division of the German league, was another Novelda. The course of the game was exactly the same, even down to the timing of the first two goals. The fact that Trier won 3–1 rather than 3–2 was neither here nor there.

  29. Robert between Hanno Balitsch (rear) and Mikael Forssell (front) at a Hannover 96 training-camp.

  The season was just one game old and Hannover 96 had already lost faith that things could end well for them. For a whole summer the players and Dieter Hecking had made a great effort to persuade themselves that things could work out between them. But this defeat brought out all the destructive thoughts in the team: the playing system with one defensive midfield player and two strikers wasn’t working; they weren’t a real team any more; when would the club finally release them from their coach? Working with them must have been a source of torment for Hecking.

  Thoughts raged in Robert’s head, too, and again and again he reached the same conclusion: nothing was going to work out. The black thoughts multiplied, his head grew leaden under their weight, and suddenly it became clear to him just what he had been incubating since July.

  He had a moleskin diary in which he recorded his appointments. For Wednesday, 5 August 2009 he wrote 10 and 3.30 pm training. Immediately after that he now added: At the moment it’s incredibly hard to be positive. It hit me quite quickly and unexpectedly. Talked to Terri and told her about my need to open up. I know myself that it’s impossible.

  He was wondering: why now? The first clinical depression had hit him in 2003 when he felt worthless with FC Barcelona as a misunderstood goalkeeper. But this time he could see no similar trigger. He never did find a clear answer to the question of why the black thoughts returned that summer, and no one will ever be able to give him an answer.

  There were things weighing upon him at that time, of course. He felt the pressure, self-created but multiplied by the media, not to allow himself a single mistake from now on, in the season of his life, if he wanted to be Germany
’s number one. The tense situation at Hannover 96, in which as captain he was caught in the middle, was also tearing at his nerves. Lara’s death was ever-present, even though he had come to terms with it as best he could over a period of almost two years – but one can never forget the death of a child. It could be that that burden alone brought the darkness back. But it’s equally possible that his second clinical depression was triggered by something else, perhaps a minor factor that neither Robert nor his psychiatrist nor anyone else could have recognised. Depressions don’t arise according to a pattern. If someone is susceptible to the illness it’s quite possible that he will regularly cope with extremely stressful situations without any difficulty, but at a particular moment will be thrown off the rails by what might appear from the outside to be a trivial or mundane matter.

  He thought he knew what needed to be done. He would have to get up early in the morning, ideally change Leila’s nappy, not spend long over breakfast, and then get off to training. If he started the day in a structured way, if he did one thing after another, the fear wouldn’t find so much room inside his head. The crucial thing was the morning. He woke up with a fear of the day, and if he stayed in bed even for a minute that fear would take him prisoner.

  Hanno Balitsch couldn’t understand it. Robert was constantly biting his lips, and he hardly spoke these days. Even when he was with the other players trotting down the beaten path from the training-ground back to the changing-rooms he seemed strangely stand-offish. His gaze wasn’t focused on anything any more. He looked right through his team-mates.

  After training the outfield players kept on their boots, which had short plastic studs, as they jogged the few hundred metres back to the changing-rooms. The goalkeepers, who used long aluminium studs, swapped their boots for trainers, for reasons of comfort. Hanno exploited the opportunity when Robert knelt down on the pitch on his own for a moment to change his footwear.

  ‘Are you leaving the sinking ship, Robs?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Hanno had been wondering about what might be troubling his friend and he had remembered something Robert had recently confided in him: he could be joining Schalke before the start of the Bundesliga if Bayern Munich managed to winkle away Schalke’s goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. Schalke’s coach Felix Magath had once sounded out Robert over such an eventuality.

  ‘No, nothing happening there,’ Robert said.

  ‘But something’s bringing you down.’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t tell you right now.’

  ‘OK.’

  Hanno didn’t ask any more questions. He and Robert had a friendship with clear boundaries. They didn’t talk about private concerns. Hanno had the feeling that ‘Robs wasn’t the type who could cope if you told him private things like, “I’m having problems at home at the moment”. He would have felt uncomfortable about that.’

  They walked to the changing-rooms together, the only sound Hanno’s football boots clattering on the tarmac of the car park.

  At home, Robert said to Teresa, ‘Shit, Hanno’s noticed something.’

  In the afternoon he looked for something he could do to prove that he was still in control of things. He cleaned the jacuzzi. He didn’t feel any improvement. Then he got furious: why should cleaning the jacuzzi make anything better? How were things ever to get better?

  Over dinner, Teresa thought out loud. Perhaps they should tell somebody, at least their best friends, so that he didn’t have to live in a cloak-and-dagger way all the time?

  Before training the next morning he asked Hanno if he had a moment.

  ‘Have you ever had any experiences with depression?’

  ‘No,’ Hanno replied cautiously, thinking that someone in Robert’s family must suffer from it.

  ‘I have serious problems with it.’

  The term ‘depression’ meant something to Hanno Balitsch, as it does to most people. But on the way home, when he thought about what sort of an illness it was, he realised he couldn’t put his finger on anything concrete at all.

  Hanno bought the book My Black Dog by Matthew Johnstone. It’s a little picture book in which a young man with a magnificent quiff is pursued by a black dog. When the black dog appears, the man can’t enjoy anything any more; he can’t concentrate on anything, or eat anything, he’s just frightened of the black dog. And he’s so ashamed of his fear that he doesn’t tell anyone about the black dog – which only makes everything worse. ‘Keeping an emotional lie takes an incredible amount of energy,’ says the man in the picture book. ‘How I put my depression on a leash’ is the book’s subtitle.

  ‘Now I can understand a little bit what Robs goes through,’ Hanno said to Teresa.

  She asked him to keep an eye on her husband. It was important that he didn’t stray during training, that he didn’t slip into dark thoughts. ‘If you notice that he’s letting things slide, give him a kick in the backside.’

  ‘Teresa, much as I’d love to, I can’t have a go at the team captain in front of everybody.’

  ‘OK, then just push him in a positive direction.’

  Hanno Balitsch gazes steadily with clear eyes. He’s convinced that things in life are always best solved straightforwardly, even though this has caused him a few problems in his career. He stopped talking to the Bild reporters after he felt they had treated him unfairly; since then he could be sure of a devastating review if he delivered a below-average game. Robert admired Hanno’s openness while at the same time being startled by it. ‘Hanno can be very aggravating for the coach and his team-mates, but also for our opponents,’ he once said. They had immediately got on. ‘Where football was concerned, Robs and I were often of the same opinion,’ Hanno says and smiles, ‘although we usually expressed it differently. I was perhaps often too blunt. I said things to the coach or the sporting director that as a player I shouldn’t have said. Robs could say the same thing and all of a sudden it sounded diplomatic, acceptable.’

  It struck Hanno as a little bit strange that he was now giving Robert encouragement and praise for saves in training he had thought were perfectly everyday for four years. But if there’s one thing Hanno can do it’s take things as they are with a shrug. He persuaded Robert to play table tennis with him after training; he took him along to lunch. Once Robert’s mobile rang when he was on his way to the restaurant with Hanno. It was Teresa.

  ‘I’m going to lunch,’ Robert said to her.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got your pit-bull with me.’

  * * *

  A week after the defeat in Trier, Robert travelled to Berlin with the team on the InterCity Express for the first Bundesliga game of the season. As always on train journeys he sat next to Tommy Westphal and went through his club mail. ‘He’s a creature of habit,’ Tommy thought to himself. Robert thought the letters were going to fall out of his hand. He felt so incredibly tired.

  Hannover lost 1–0 to Hertha BSC. He had guessed, he had known, that nothing was going to work out any more. Jörg Neblung was watching the game on television in Cologne and thinking the opposite. ‘Amazing how Robbi can play, even in his state!’ His defenders had obstructed Robert’s view a quarter of an hour before the end of the game and he only saw Raffael de Araújo’s long-distance shot when it came flying over their heads straight at his goal, and still he managed to deflect the ball around the post with his fingertips. If he could stop shots like that, his depression couldn’t be all that advanced, Jörg thought to himself. He wanted to tell Robert, ‘Your save was sensational.’

  Robert phoned him first. ‘I can’t feel anything any more,’ he said blankly. ‘No nerves, no joy, nothing. I stood out there on the pitch and didn’t care about anything.’

  What Robert did still feel was the presence of the black dog. He put his baseball cap back on and went to see Dr Stroscher. For the second time in his life he needed anti-depressants. He was adamant that he wanted the same medicine that had helped him in 2003. By now the drug existed in an advan
ced version, which was supposed to mean it was more effective. He couldn’t wait too long for it to take effect, he felt.

  On 16 August he and Teresa were invited to the Wilkes’ as their younger daughter was turning six. The weather was good enough to have a party in the garden. He felt battered. Everyone was bound to expect him to talk to them, but how could he do that? He didn’t think he could conduct a sensible conversation. He lay down on a lounger and pretended to go to sleep.

  Uli Wilke thought, ‘How lovely. He feels so much at home here that he can just lie down and have a nap.’

  Teresa, however, was getting impatient. She knew that afterwards he would be racked with self-reproach because he couldn’t even behave normally at a children’s party. That was the trap of depression: it stripped him of the power to do the most normal things, and then the impression that he couldn’t accomplish anything any more dragged him all the more deeply into the illness.

  She rested her hand on his shoulder. He stretched on the lounger and pretended to wake up.

  ‘Come on, let’s play some tennis.’

  She pressed a racquet into his hand. He was to hit the ball, and she would try to catch it. She held Leila in one arm as she didn’t want the child to start crying as soon as she set her down, on top of everything else.

  Sabine Wilke wondered why Teresa was always answering on Robert’s behalf, why she talked to him as if he were a little child: ‘Come on, Robbi, have a piece of cake, you like cake.’ It was a great effort for him to decide all by himself whether he wanted plum cake or cheesecake. He felt chronically overtaxed by the minimal demands of everyday life. But he manoeuvred himself through the day: he trained, he smiled at the birthday party, he played his part. Doing something, however much energy it took, was still better than giving in to fatigue and having a rest. Because then the thoughts came.