A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke Read Free Page A

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 M ü ller, 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