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

proper grandma.’
    When Robert was eleven this sequence of lovely pictures took a break. He came back from school to Liselotte 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