Bernhard Rothner

Bernhard Rothner is Emmi’s husband, a pianist and father whose effort to protect his family becomes an appeal to Leo Leike, the man at the center of Emmi’s private email life. His account reveals both the history behind his marriage and the crisis that has overtaken it: after discovering and reading the correspondence, he asks Leo to meet Emmi, believing that a real encounter may puncture the idealized world their messages have created. Yet the name Bernhard uses for his wife later helps precipitate the meeting’s cancellation, turning his effort to manage the crisis into part of its emotional machinery.

Identity and Family History

Bernhard introduces himself to Leo as a man who is uncomfortable with email and embarrassed to ask for help. The request is difficult partly because he recognizes that he cannot dictate what Leo does; he can only plead. He describes feeling inferior and powerless, and says that the disruption has affected his own life and that of his family after years of what he regarded as a harmonious marriage.

His past includes an earlier marriage to Johanna, who died in a car accident that also injured Bernhard and traumatized the couple’s three-year-old child; their older child was badly injured. Bernhard says he suffered permanent injuries. Music, particularly playing the piano, helped him recover a sense of life and continuity, while his pupils and his work supplied distraction and purpose. This history makes his later fear of losing his family more than a response to a new romantic rival: he has already experienced bereavement and the collapse of a household.

Bernhard met Emmi when she was twenty-three and he was her piano teacher at the Academy of Music. He was fourteen years older, approaching forty, and at the time was happily married with two children. In the aftermath of his family’s tragedy, Emmi began helping him and the children without expecting anything in return. Bernhard describes her as lively and generous, and says that the children immediately took to her before he fell in love with her.

Marriage and Emmi’s Place in the Family

Bernhard is candid about what he cannot know: he cannot determine exactly why Emmi came to love him. He considers several possibilities, including admiration for his music, sympathy for his grief, a wish to help, affection for the children, and the security of his loyalty. He says he would not have pursued her if he had not believed her feelings were as strong as his own. Emmi wanted to become a definitive part of his and the children’s world, and they married two years after meeting. At the time of his letter, they have been married for eight years.

He recalls living with a persistent fear that a younger man would attract Emmi, whom he says many men admired. That feared scenario never came to pass. What did happen, in his view, was more destabilizing: Leo became an unseen presence in the marriage. Bernhard calls him an “other world” built from email, in which growing longing and passion seem directed toward a future meeting that keeps being postponed. He believes the attraction gains force from remaining an ideal that ordinary, face-to-face life cannot test.

Discovery and Collapse

Bernhard notices that Emmi has become absentminded and distant. She spends hours in her room looking at the computer, and the expression of happiness he sees on her face no longer seems meant for him. He says she has to work to conceal her distraction from the children and that sitting beside him appears difficult for her. Although he had tried to be tolerant and says neither spouse had previously been jealous, he no longer knows how to respond to the change.

The hidden correspondence gives the situation a tangible form. Bernhard searches Emmi’s room and finds a folder in a secret drawer: printed copies of her emails with Leo, preserved page by page. He copies the documents with a trembling hand, then tries for several weeks to put them out of mind. During a family holiday in Portugal, their younger child is ill and the older child falls in love with a sports instructor. Bernhard and Emmi do not speak to each other for two weeks, while each tries to maintain the appearance that all is well.

On a later hiking trip, Bernhard takes the folder and reads the emails through in a single night. He describes the experience as the greatest emotional torture he has endured since Johanna’s death. After finishing the correspondence, he cannot get out of bed; his daughter calls emergency services, and he is taken to hospital. Emmi collects him from the hospital two days before he writes to Leo. The sequence makes the emails not merely a source of jealousy but a crisis with an immediate physical and family consequence.

The Appeal to Leo

Bernhard’s letter asks Leo to meet Emmi and, in a further attempt to end what he sees as an unsustainable attachment, to make their written intimacy physical once. He says he believes Emmi wants bodily as well as emotional closeness and frames a real encounter as a possible culmination that might bring the correspondence to a stop. His proposal is strikingly self-abasing: he says he would not regard it as infidelity and urges Leo to act for Emmi and the children, so that the family might continue.

The appeal rests on a contrast between Leo’s apparent perfection and Bernhard’s ordinary vulnerability. Because Leo exists for Bernhard as a mind encountered through words rather than as a person he can confront, Bernhard feels unable to compete on equal terms. He hopes that meeting will make Leo human and imperfect, and therefore remove the imagined superiority that has left him feeling powerless. His plan is not evidence that the meeting will repair the marriage; it is Bernhard’s desperate theory of how an ideal sustained at a distance might lose its hold.

Bernhard also asks Leo to keep the letter secret. He admits that he has violated Emmi’s confidence by searching her room and reading her private correspondence, and says he cannot bear for her to know either that he spied or what he discovered. The request places a further strain on his appeal: he wants Leo to intervene in the marriage, but also to keep Bernhard outside the shared story of Emmi and Leo. His plea for secrecy is therefore part of his attempt to preserve the family even as he acts behind his wife’s back.

The Name and the Aborted Meeting

Later, Emmi explains to Leo why she canceled their planned meeting at the very last minute. She had told Bernhard that she was going to meet a friend, and he responded with the expected encouragement, then added her name in an unexpected form: “Have fun, EMMI.” Bernhard has long called her “Emma,” she says, and had not called her “Emmi” for years. The altered final letter makes the familiar exchange feel newly exposing to her.

Emmi interprets Bernhard’s use of “Emmi” as a sign that he has seen through her: she feels that the name belongs to the identity she has recovered in relation to Leo, not to her husband’s way of addressing her. The evidence does not establish that Bernhard intended the word as an accusation, but for Emmi its appearance shatters the concealment on which her plan depended. She cancels the meeting rather than go. Thus Bernhard’s intervention has consequences beyond his letter: the same marriage he hopes to protect becomes the setting for the small verbal change that halts Emmi’s movement toward an encounter with Leo.