Bernhard Rothner’s discovery of Emmi Rothner and Leo Leike’s printed emails turns a private correspondence into an explicit marital crisis. Unable to compete with an absent man who exists for Emmi through words, Bernhard writes to Leo with a startling request: meet Emmi, and let their imagined intimacy encounter reality. His appeal is at once an act of desperation, an attempt to recover his wife, and a confession that he has secretly read her correspondence.

Discovery and the request

Bernhard introduces himself to Leo as Emmi’s husband and says that asking for a favor is difficult and humiliating. He believes the correspondence has put both his life and his family’s out of joint. The favor itself is direct: Leo should finally meet Emmi and bring the nightmare to an end. Bernhard stresses that he cannot dictate Leo’s actions, but pleads with him to meet her because he feels powerless and inferior.

The appeal rests on an asymmetry. Bernhard has no concrete offense to hold against Leo: he describes him as neither tangible nor real, but as an illusion of emotional happiness built from words. That very intangibility makes the rival difficult to challenge. Bernhard imagines that an in-person meeting would expose Leo as vulnerable and imperfect, removing the sense of superiority that the correspondence has given him and allowing Bernhard to compete for Emmi on equal terms.

The marriage behind the crisis

Bernhard sets his appeal against the history of his marriage. When he met Emmi, she was twenty-three and he was her piano teacher at the Academy of Music, fourteen years older, widowed, and raising two children. His first wife, Johanna, had died in a car accident that also left lasting consequences for Bernhard and his family. Music helped him recover, and teaching gave his life purpose; then Emmi entered it. They married two years after meeting, and, at the time of the letter, had been married for eight years.

He does not offer a simple explanation for why Emmi chose him. He considers whether she loved his music, felt sympathy for him, wanted to help, or was drawn to his children and the family life they represented. He also wonders whether she valued his dependability and loyalty. Yet he insists that her feelings for him seemed strong, and that she wanted a central place in his world. His account makes the marriage neither a sham nor an easy guarantee: he describes years of harmony and mutual commitment, while admitting that he had long feared a younger admirer might one day draw Emmi away.

A rival made of words

Bernhard names Leo as the unexpected form that his old fear has taken. He describes the emails as an emotional world that grows more intense through longing and postponed consummation. In his view, the prospect of a meeting is continually deferred because the correspondence can preserve an ideal of happiness that an actual encounter might disturb. The imagined relationship is powerful precisely because it need not face the limitations of ordinary life.

The change in Emmi is, for Bernhard, the visible consequence. He says she has become absentminded and distant, spending hours in her room at the computer and appearing absorbed in another world. Her moments of happiness no longer seem directed toward him, and he sees her making an effort to hide her distraction from the children. Bernhard says he tried to endure the change without constraining her, but could not understand what was wrong while the apparent rival remained unseen.

His account is also shaped by earlier ways of separating the email relationship from family life. Emmi had described their correspondence as something that could not be admitted into the world she shared with Bernhard and the children. In one message, she invoked the rooms and objects of the household—the piano, bookcase, music, and bed—as if they guarded the boundary around that life. Bernhard’s letter reverses the separation: he has found the correspondence and now addresses Leo directly, bringing the supposedly outside relationship into the household’s crisis.

The folder and its consequences

Bernhard explains how the correspondence became known to him. He searched Emmi’s room and found a concealed drawer containing a thick folder of her emails with Leo, printed page by page. He copied the papers, tried for several weeks to put them out of his mind, and then took the folder on a hiking trip. There he read the entire exchange in one night. The experience overwhelmed him: he could not get out of bed, and his daughter called emergency services. He was taken to hospital and later returned home.

The discovery is therefore not only a revelation about Emmi’s attachment to Leo; it is also the result of Bernhard’s own breach of privacy. He acknowledges that he went behind his wife’s back and read intimate messages without her knowledge. In the letter, this knowledge leaves him doubly exposed: he is suffering from what he has learned, but cannot openly discuss it with Emmi without revealing how he learned it.

A plea kept secret

Bernhard’s proposed solution is deliberately framed as a single culmination. He believes Emmi wants physical as well as emotional intimacy with Leo and thinks that one meeting might complete the passion expressed in their emails and bring it to a stop. He tells Leo that he would not treat such an encounter as infidelity, and asks him to release Emmi from the idealized relationship and return her to ordinary family life. The appeal is not evidence that Leo accepts the proposal; it records Bernhard’s desperate attempt to make the virtual relationship finite.

The letter ends with a second request: Leo must not reveal that Bernhard wrote or that he read the emails. Bernhard fears that Emmi would be unable to look at him if she knew, just as he would be unable to face her knowing what he had read. His message thus asks Leo to intervene in the marriage while preserving the secrecy on which Bernhard’s own position depends. In the correspondence’s epistolary structure, the letter gives Leo privileged access to Bernhard’s history and distress, but its carefully argued self-presentation remains the account of a husband trying to influence a rival whose reality he cannot yet test.