A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Page 2

  On Sunday, Teresa always came back to the high school sports college on the last train from Bad Windsheim. Even in her second year in Jena she still went to see her parents almost every weekend.

  She was hurrying out of the icy station when she spotted him on the bench. She sat next to Robert at school. When she, a Bavarian outsider, had arrived in Year 12 at the East German sports college a year and a half earlier there had only been two seats free, one on its own at the back and one next to Robert. They got on well, she thought, though if she was him she’d give the haircut a bit of thought. He had already started training with the professional footballers of Carl Zeiss Jena and wore his fair hair the way they did, short at the sides, long at the top – ‘like a bird’s nest on his head’.

  1. Robert with Teresa and his family after a game between Jena sports college and a Thuringian team.

  ‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ she asked him. It was after ten o’clock at night.

  ‘I’m waiting for somebody.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, have a nice evening.’

  She smiled at him briefly and hurried on.

  ‘Hey!’ he cried after her. ‘You’re the one I’m waiting for, obviously!’

  And he’d been waiting for more than five hours, he told her a bit later, when they were having a drink in a bar called the French Pub.

  He was still living with his mother in the flats on Liselotte Herrmann Strasse, but he hadn’t told her or anyone that he was going to go and wait for Teresa at the station. He kept his feelings, his important decisions, all to himself. For weeks afterwards, while he and Teresa were getting closer, he didn’t tell his friends a thing. But they weren’t surprised when the two of them became a couple – that Robert Enke could achieve that, too. ‘We still often talk about it,’ says one of his former school friends, Torsten Ziegner, ‘about how Robert was this kid with a really sunny nature who managed to do whatever he put his mind to, who couldn’t be thrown off track, who was always in a good mood.’ Torsten turns his glass of water around in front of him to keep the short silence from getting too big. And for a moment everyone there in the living-room of Andy Meyer, another friend from those days, thinks the same thing: how strange that sounds today, thinking of Robert as a kid with a sunny nature. ‘Although,’ Andy says at last, speaking bravely into the silence, ‘actually I still think that, in spite of everything, Enkus was a child of joy.’

  The daylight, reflected by the snow and given a glaring quality, falls through the window of the single-family house in Zwätzen, an area of newly built houses just outside Jena. It’s one in the afternoon and Andy has just got up. There’s still a hint of tiredness in his eyes. He’s a nurse and was on night-shift. Torsten’s jeans fit loosely; the Gallagher brothers would like his jacket with its little diamonds and its stand-up collar. He’s a professional footballer, a slender, wiry athlete, and at thirty-two he’s back with FC Carl Zeiss Jena in the Third Liga. You see Andy and Torsten, in their early thirties, and you immediately sense the warmth, the humour, of those youthful times. ‘We realised immediately that we had the same interests – or rather, the same disinterests,’ says Torsten.

  ‘More than anything else,’ adds Andy, ‘we laughed.’

  It was always the four of them in those days: Torsten Ziegner, Andy Meyer, Mario Kanopa, who went off to be a teacher on the Dutch border, and Robert Enke, who they called Enkus – who they go on calling Enkus because as far as they’re concerned he’s still the person he used to be.

  Robert grew up among clothes lines. He and his friends met in the courtyards of the flats in the afternoon. ‘Over the Line’ was the name of the game on the estate. He would stand in goal between two clothes props and lob the ball over to his partner who would then volley the ball at the goal.

  From a distance his home, the satellite town of Lobeda, is still the first thing you see of Jena. Some forty thousand people used to live there, more than a third of the inhabitants of Jena; about seventeen thousand remain. On the side-streets between the fifteen-storey industrialised blocks on the Communist boulevards there are a few lower blocks no different from the ones you might see in a West German suburb like Frankfurt-Schwanheim or Dortmund-Nordstadt. While the two German states were constantly reminding each other of their differences, in the eighties such apartment blocks made boys’ lives pretty similar in East and West. Washing props ruled the world, from Jena-Lobeda to Frankfurt-Schwanheim. They only learned about adult concerns, Andy Meyer says, after the collapse of East Germany, though perhaps as children they’d just found them boring and hence ignored them: that Andy’s father couldn’t become a teacher because he wasn’t in the Party; that Robert’s father, a 400-metre hurdler, was thrown out of high-performance sports promotion because he received postcards from a brother who had escaped to the West.

  They would only interrupt their courtyard games for a special reason – when they had to go to football training. Andy Meyer, who lived a few blocks away, had been spotted by the city’s big club, FC Carl Zeiss, early on. He was seven at the time, and he got used to winning with Carl Zeiss. So Andy has a particularly clear memory of one defeat. On the uneven pitch in Am Jenzig, at the foot of Jena’s Hausberg mountain, FC Carl Zeiss lost 3–1 to SV Jenapharm. Big clubs have their ways of dealing with such defeats, even in children’s teams: Helmut Müller, Carl Zeiss’s coach, immediately walked over to the parents of Jenapharm’s striker, who had scored all three goals, and told them their son should join Carl Zeiss straight away.

  It was Robert Enke.

  In every sportsman’s biography there’s a moment when some people say, ‘What luck!’ And others, ‘So that’s what they call fate.’ Muhammad Ali’s Schwinn bicycle was stolen when he was twelve, and the policeman who took his statement advised him to stop crying and become a boxer. Robert was a decent attacking player in the Under-10 youth team at FC Carl Zeiss Jena when the father of Thomas, the goalkeeper, was moved to Moscow for professional reasons. The side needed a new goalkeeper. ‘The coach had no idea,’ says Andy Meyer, ‘so everyone had to have a go in goal. The whole business was sorted out quickly. Our lucky kid saved two shots and from that point on he was number one.’

  2. Robert Enke (left) at Carnival.

  Without knowing how, Robert did everything right: the powerful jump, holding the hands with thumbs spread when catching, the decision to pluck one cross out of the air and not to risk it with the next one. Although ‘most of the time he didn’t do a thing’, his father says. ‘Carl Zeiss was so superior among the children’s teams that the goalkeeper got bored. But that suited him.’ A gentle smile, for a few seconds free of pain, slips across his father’s face as he holds the memory. ‘It meant he didn’t have to run so much.’

  Dirk Enke has the same smile as his son. Unusually slowly, as if he were trying politely to hold it back, it spreads across his face. He was worried about the moment when he would have to talk about Robert; worried that the memories would become too strong. So at first, in his flat on Marktplatz, high above the roofs of Jena, he let the slides do the talking. Someone recently – Dirk Enke says ‘afterwards’ – gave him a projector so that he could take another look at the old slides from Robert’s childhood in East Germany. The three children on a camping holiday on the Baltic – Anja, Gunnar and Robert, the afterthought, who was born nine years after his sister and seven years after his brother. ‘You only actually got a pitch permit when you had four children,’ says Robert’s father, but there were things that weren’t followed up all that precisely, even in a surveillance state. ‘We always put down four, and no one ever checked.’ The projector clicks on – Robert with his third grandma. ‘My proper grandma’ was what he called Frau Käthe, a pensioner from next door who often looked after him, and with whom he liked to spend time, even as an adolescent. As a child he always used to say, ‘I’ve got a fat grandma, a thin grandma and a proper grandma.’

  When Robert was eleven this sequence of lovely pictures took a break. He came back from school to Liselot
te Herrmann Strasse to find his father standing by the door with a bag.

  ‘Papi, where are you going?’

  His father couldn’t bring himself to reply. He walked in silence, with watery eyes, to the car.

  His son ran to his mother in the flat. ‘What’s happened?’

  His mother sobbed. ‘We had a bit of an argument. Your father’s moving into the shack in Cospeda for the time being.’

  There was a new woman in his father’s life.

  Robert asked his mother every day for weeks, ‘Mama, how are you?’ Gisela could see in his face how much he feared a sad reply.

  But his parents refused to believe that their marriage was over. They went on seeing each other, ‘and we didn’t just do it for the sake of the children. I was with Dirk for thirty years, we’d known each other as adolescents.’ That summer they went on holiday together to Lake Balaton. Robert sat in the back of the car and said, loudly but casually, as if he weren’t speaking to anyone in particular, ‘Well, if it leads to a reconciliation, let’s just go on holiday to Lake Balaton.’ Rather than joyful, he sounded hopeful.

  ‘The fall of the Wall brought us back together again,’ Robert’s mother reveals. The intoxication of the demonstrations and the excitement of the big approaching changes reunited the family before the Germanys could do the same. Dirk Enke moved back into the flat. For their silver wedding anniversary they went on a cycling tour on the Rhine near Koblenz.

  The Enkes were among those who greeted reunification without a hint of scepticism. Robert’s father was able to greet the larger part of his family on the western side of the border. ‘My feeling was: at last!’ When the Wall came down, the boys amid the washing props were twelve or thirteen – the last generation to have consciously experienced two German states, the first to grow up in both. Andy Meyer can still remember how Robert and he paraded up and down the Löbdergraben with their Carl Zeiss youth team in honour of GDR President Erich Honecker. ‘And what we thought was great was that there were food coupons for bockwursts afterwards,’ Andy Meyer recalls. They became aware of the new age in a similarly casual manner. In fact they just went on playing, ignoring the changes. They didn’t even take a break for reunification. ‘There was nothing crucial about it for us kids,’ says Andy. He laughs. ‘The football training just went on.’

  In Lobeda, however, the former socialist dream of a nicer way of living found itself faced with a new proletariat. The children had to come to terms with that. Turks from West Germany sold carpets door to door, believing that they could swindle the naive ‘Ossis’, as East Germans were known. The young people of the satellite town suddenly started ganging together and saying they were on the far right.

  ‘Don’t let anyone in,’ Gisela warned her son, who was regularly at home alone after school because both parents worked, she as a teacher of Russian and sport, he as a psychotherapist at the city hospital.

  Robert cautiously opened the door one day when the bell rang. Great-uncle Rudi, a university Latin professor, was paying a visit.

  ‘Hello, are your parents at home?’

  The boy looked at him through screwed-up eyes.

  ‘You don’t recognise me, do you? I’m Great-uncle Rudi.’

  ‘Anyone could say that!’ yelled Robert, pushing the baffled professor away and slamming the door shut.

  Another time the right-wing thugs were waiting for him on the way home from school. They grabbed him and started shoving him around, but before he was hit one of them recognised him. ‘Stop, it’s Robert Enke!’ He was twelve. He was clearly already famous as a goalie. They let him go.

  But the fear didn’t go away. He yearned for a protective skin. He begged his mother to buy him a bomber jacket, then the right-wingers would mistake him for one of their own and leave him alone. ‘At first I was horrified that he wanted to give in like that,’ says his mother, ‘but, OK, I thought, if it means he’s not scared. And he only wore the jacket for a few weeks.’

  When the first wave of disillusion arrived in the united Germany, even reunification lost its power to hold the Enkes’ marriage together.

  One Sunday, as the family sat in the living-room, Robert’s father took a deep breath.

  ‘I have something to tell you.’

  The mother knew already. The other woman in his life had never quite disappeared from the scene.

  ‘Gisela and I are splitting up. I’m moving out.’

  Robert leapt up from the sofa and ran out of the door.

  ‘Gunnar, run, bring the boy back!’ cried his mother.

  Gunnar found his brother in the road. He refused to speak. He didn’t want anything to show. He’d got used to dealing with his own sadness.

  To his three friends he seemed to have lost nothing of his sunny disposition. ‘Enkus chucked a glass of water around, and everyone got wet except him – that’s how it always was,’ says Andy. A teacher caught Robert cheating during a biology exam, copying the work of the student next to him. He got an E. But when the reports were sent out he got a Satisfactory in biology. He was strikingly helpful, prudent and a gifted goalkeeper, and that combination clearly inclined his teachers to leniency. Robert knew he would do reasonably well at school without having to try too hard, and didn’t strive for more.

  3. The youth team of CZ Jena on a trip to Tunisia. Robert is on the left, second from the front, and second from the front on the right is his friend Mario Kanopa.

  Mario Kanopa and Torsten Ziegner had come to the sports college at the age of fourteen, and the names of their home clubs still contained an echo of a villagey world far away from Jena: Mario came from the company sports team Traktor Frauenpriessnitz, Torsten from BSG Mikroelektronik Neuhaus/ Rennweg. They often squabbled in their little dormitory. If anything bothered him, Torsten immediately lost his temper. His impulsiveness infuriated Mario. Enkus got on excellently with both of them. If he was there, they all got along famously.

  Newspaper cuttings about them began to be pinned to the wall of the entrance hall at the sports college. In 1993 Robert, Torsten and Mario travelled with the Thuringian state side to the traditional federal states Under-16 Youth Cup where the scouts from the professional clubs would be standing on the sidelines. It’s at this annual tournament at the Wedau Sportschule in Duisburg that fifteen-year-olds first become potential professionals in the eyes of the football scene. At first the Thuringian team thought that what happened in Duisburg was a great joke; at the end ‘we laughed our heads off about ourselves’, Torsten Ziegner remembers. In an absurd repetition, one game was much like another. They regularly looked like the defeated team, but they never lost. ‘It was,’ Torsten says, ‘as if Robert was playing on his own.’ With every shot he caught Robert seemed more enormous to the strikers who appeared in front of him. In this tournament he attained the supreme mental state of a goalkeeper: in the midst of all the frantic activity of the game, absolute peace settles upon you. However hard the strikers shoot, you think the ball belongs only to you. An almighty sense of security fills you and makes you ever bigger. Thuringia’s results in Duisburg were 0–0, 0–0, 1–0 and 4–0. No one got a shot past him.

  In the same year Carl Zeiss Jena reached the final of the German Under-16 youth championship, a feat no club with similarly modest means would emulate over the next fifteen years. The club president invited the team to a bar called Sockenschuss for a round of Coca-Colas. They lost the final 5–1 to Borussia Dortmund. But even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sent someone to write a report about Jena’s sports college. The head teacher went on the record, saying of her footballers, ‘They’re not particularly tidy, they eat anything, they almost always appear as a team and have a distinct sense of self-confidence.’

  Later the four friends will cover the entire spectrum of what may befall a talented footballer: Robert Enke becomes his country’s goalkeeper; Torsten becomes a local hero, a captain, a go-to player with Carl Zeiss Jena in the Second Bundesliga and the Third Liga; at the age of twenty-two Mario ends his pro
fessional career after a serious injury, his record one Second Bundesliga game, one goal; and at the age of fifteen Andy is told by Carl Zeiss that they’re sorry, he’s not good enough, from now on he’ll have to play in the lower leagues, just for fun.

  Unlike Andy, at fifteen Robert Enke, Torsten Ziegner and Mario Kanopa played for the national youth team against England at Wembley Stadium in front of thirty thousand schoolchildren. The game ended goalless. The Daily Telegraph reported, ‘A combination of fantastic goalkeeping feats and pathetic shots at the goal prevented England’s victory.’ They were talking about Robert Enke, perhaps with one incident in particular in mind. He was still on the floor after saving a furious shot from Stephen Clemence when Jay Curtis shaped to hit a follow-up shot. He leapt up and deflected that shot too, his reaction too fast for the spectators to see where his hand had come from.

  He had been discovered. German youth footballer of the month, a full page in Kicker magazine. In a special edition, ‘The Sixteen-Year-Olds’, Stern portrayed him as the protagonist of his generation. ‘Often I don’t think about the world,’ Robert, very much the teenager, told Stern, ‘but sometimes I have the feeling the Apocalypse is coming soon.’

  In the terraces at Wembley Stadium, Dirk Enke sat with some of the other parents. Football became his bond with his son. After moving out, he tried to go to every game. He studied the other fathers. He saw some of them yelling at their children when they made mistakes, and if their children succeeded in doing something they yelled at them again. Shoot! For heaven’s sake, pass the ball! Faster! Shoot! Robert’s father sat quietly and attentively at the edge of the pitch. He thought he was doing the right thing. ‘Dirk was a great father,’ Gisela says. ‘But after our separation he had a hard time with the children.’