The website of the Hannover 96 football club was blacked out except for a simple statement: “Wir trauern um Robert Enke.” We mourn for Robert Enke.

He was the club’s goalkeeper, its captain, its most likely player to make Germany’s World Cup team next year. On Tuesday evening, Enke was hit and killed by a train at a level crossing near his home. After his widow, Teresa, said that Enke suffered from a depression he feared could result in their family being broken up, German newspapers ran with two lines of commentary. One was that Enke, a quiet and reserved individual, was a troubled man ever since his biological daughter, Lara, died at the age of 2 in September 2006. She had a rare heart malformation. The other was the loneliness, the uncertainty, of a goalie’s situation.

Enke had chosen as a boy to play in the most exposed position, the one first blamed when things go wrong. Born in Jena, in East Germany, he joined SV Jena Pharm in 1985, when he was 8.

He moved to Carl Zeiss Jena the next year and had been moving on ever since. There were three years at Borussia Mönchengladbach, three years in Portugal with Benfica. Enke’s counselling began when he moved to Barcelona. He was the eternal understudy there, the rising German keeper given just three opportunities with the first team. Barcelona thought highly of him, but lent him to Fenerbache of Istanbul, then to Tenerife. His Turkish misadventure lasted just one match, a loss after which Fenerbache fans bombarded him with firecrackers and missiles in their anger at losing.

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