Last week I finished reading “A Life Too Short” – Ronald Reng’s award-winning biography of the German goalkeeper Robert Enke. Enke was a top young goalkeeper in German football (at Carl Zeiss Jena and Borussia Moenchengladbach) before moving abroad to play in Portugal (Benfica), Spain (Barcelona), Turkey (Fenerbahce) and Tenerife before returning to Germany to play for Hanover 96. Whilst the footballing aspects of Enke’s life are interesting, they are really just the backdrop over which Reng describes Enke’s battle with depression – always simmering away but triggered most violently by the way he was treated during his time at Barcelona and his subsequent, rapidly curtailed, loan move to Turkey. Enke’s story is a cycle of ups and downs – (surprisingly) up at Benfica, down at Barcelona and further down at Fenerbahce, then slowly and surely back up again at Tenerife and Hanover before a final desperate spiral into irreperable self-doubt and darkness abruptly ended on the day that Enke walked in from of a train to end his life at the age of 32.
As noted above, this is an award-winning book, but it is not the writing as such, but the candid way that Enke’s life and his inner struggle is recounted (using his diaries which he kept so that one day he could write a book about his problems) – the story of the book, that makes it fit for an award. Reading about Enke’s career and home-life (“happily” married but losing a daughter, Lara, early in her life and adopting another, Leila, not long before he took his own), and in particular about the peculiar trials and pressures of being a goalkeeper, gives a sense that it is perhaps not surprising that even a talented top-level sportsman can suffer as Enke did. But the “story” and the issues are certainly transferable. There is one particular section, that describes how Enke felt about his work and the expectations that others placed on him, that seemed frighteningly like my own feelings about my work at times.
There’s no post-life analysis in “A Life Too Short”. The book tells the story of this tragic, flawed life and you know the way it ends from the outset. But then the end comes. The dark cloud descends and finally the pain is over, and no-one who is left behind, whether they knew Robert Enke or just heard his story or read the book, can really make sense of the life that was too short, but, sadly, in terms of its inner struggle, not at all uncommon.
Tim O'Hare 