He talks about his illness, the drama of his youth and Bavaria: how Babbel suffered from the suicide of his brother

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Blick: Markus Babbel, when you were a teenager, your older brother committed suicide. You only spoke about it publicly after Robert Enke’s suicide. You don’t seem like the type of person who eats things into themselves.
Chatter: But that was me for a long time. When my brother Gerhard committed suicide, I was 17. I had never come into contact with death and was completely lost. How should you deal with something like that as a teenager? Besides, I didn’t want to be a burden to my parents.

Haven’t you even talked to your parents about it?
Hardly. I saw how great her grief was. I’ve always had a very close relationship with my mother, so I didn’t want to demand her attention when she was doing so poorly. At the same time, people at that time did not talk about such topics with their friends. That was simply not the case at the time, in the late 1980s.

Was this a good coping strategy?
Of course not.

Have you blamed yourself for not being able to help your big brother?
No. I had no idea, I didn’t even know depression existed as a disease. But sometimes I was angry with him. Really angry.

Why?
How could he harm us so much? At first I didn’t understand that at all. We were such a good team, Gerhard and I. We could have achieved so much together. And then he just threw himself in front of a train. I had no idea the torment he had endured before.

When Robert Enke did the same in November 2009, you made Gerhard’s fate public.
That wasn’t planned. I was a coach at VfB Stuttgart at the time and a journalist probably just asked me the right question at the right time. I told you about it because I felt like I could make a difference. Depression has been a taboo subject in football and in our society for too long. For far too long, many people did not know how serious this disease is. At the time, I thought it was important that we did not simply resume business as usual after Robert Enke’s death.

How do you feel about it today?
I have just published my autobiography. For the book I had to delve very deeply into the pain, the despair, everything that this suicide caused at the time. It was like therapy. I used to be shocked when someone jumped off a bridge somewhere, many things came back to the surface. Today I feel like I have found peace. It was Gerhard’s decision to die. We have to accept it, no matter how painful it is.

Has the handling of mental health in sport improved since Enke’s death?
Much better. Young players are better cared for and they also talk to each other and their coaches about what is bothering them. It is no longer the case that mental health is seen as given by God. You can also work on that, the trainers know that nowadays, while in the past they would only say: “He can’t handle pressure.” And finished.

An ex-professional who doesn’t complain about the new generation?
I don’t think everything is good either. But when it comes to dealing with their own psyche and, for that matter, their own body, they are a big step further than we were then.

The next blow of fate came in 2001. Now, players at Liverpool, you fell ill with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious nerve disease, and were temporarily paralyzed on one side. How did you beat this disease?
The discipline of football has helped me. I got my physio exercises, did them and gradually made progress. I was also very well looked after. But I was lucky that I could play football again. My doctor initially told me it was safe to walk again. Sport? Insecure. Professional sports? Anyway.

They had quickly become a crowd favorite in Liverpool. After your illness, you were no longer the same in sporting terms.
That’s the only thing I really regret about my career: that I only had one real season at Liverpool. I couldn’t have imagined that I would get there so well. From Bayern Munich I was used to the attacking players being the stars. But a great tackle was also celebrated exuberantly in England. That was phenomenal, a completely new experience for a defender like me.

They then went from Liverpool to Blackburn…
…and ended up in another world. In Liverpool, Gérard Houiller was the coach and we trained according to the current state of sports science. Blackburn under Graeme Souness, on the other hand, was the old English football culture.

Is called?
There was a lot of drinking. If things didn’t go well, there were short training camps: three or four days in Mallorca or something like that. The team burned with alcohol every night. And everyone had to participate, you weren’t allowed to leave until you were full of stars. Only my Turkish teammate Tugay was exempt from this as a Muslim.

Doesn’t sound like professional football.
Sometimes it even helped and the team started winning again. And I admit I enjoyed it for a while. Especially after the serious illness, I wanted to take certain things a little easier.

So you didn’t go to a psychologist then?
No. I would have needed psychological help, but I wasn’t that smart back then. In addition, my English was not good enough to really be able to go into depth with an English psychologist. So I picked up a lot off the pitch in Blackburn. I have done a lot to ensure that my performance was no longer up to par.

Alcohol as therapy?
I spent a lot of time wandering around the house. In England, as a footballer you can very easily achieve female gender. The temptation was great and I took advantage of it for a while. But at some point I realized that I didn’t like it. That’s why I wanted to leave England in the summer of 2004. Otherwise it wouldn’t have ended well for me.

Source : Blick