Bernhard asks Leo to meet Emmi

Bernhard Rothner’s letter to Leo Leike turns his private fear about Emmi’s correspondence into an extraordinary plea: he asks Leo to meet his wife, believing that the rival who exists only through words must become an imperfect, tangible person before Bernhard can contend with him. The request escalates into an offer to accept a single sexual encounter as the culmination of the email relationship, while Bernhard begs Leo to keep the letter secret. Its central contradiction is that Bernhard wants Leo to make himself real enough to lose his imagined superiority, yet asks him to do so without exposing the secret Bernhard has himself uncovered.

The request and its stakes

Addressing Leo formally as Mr. Leike, Bernhard introduces himself and admits that writing is difficult and embarrassing. He says the turmoil has disrupted not only his own life but his family’s, including what he describes as years of harmonious marriage. His request is emphatic: Leo should finally meet Emmi and bring the nightmare to an end. Bernhard cannot dictate what Leo does, he acknowledges, but he implores him to meet her.

The letter makes clear how powerless Bernhard feels. He says he has nothing to reproach Leo for, because Leo is not physically present and has not, in Bernhard’s view, committed a recognizable wrong. He describes Leo as intangible: an imagined source of unlimited emotional happiness, built out of words. That abstraction is precisely what makes the rival difficult to face. Bernhard believes a real encounter would reveal Leo as vulnerable and imperfect, allowing him to compete on more equal terms for his wife.

Bernhard’s proposed resolution

Bernhard does not stop at asking for a meeting. He imagines that Leo and Emmi might spend a night together and have sex once, and says he would give Leo permission and would not consider it cheating. He believes Emmi wants physical as well as mental intimacy with Leo, and that she is drawn to a novelty Bernhard cannot offer. The proposal is framed not as a favor to Bernhard or his children but as something Leo should do for Emmi.

He casts that single encounter as an ending: the culmination of the passion developed in writing, a final crown on the correspondence, and a means of stopping it. Bernhard’s appeal thus tries to transform an ongoing, largely invisible emotional relationship into a bounded event with a clear conclusion. The plea to release Emmi and return her to ordinary life gives the proposed encounter its paradoxical purpose: Bernhard invites the rival he fears to come closer in the hope that intimacy will diminish the ideal he cannot otherwise challenge.

Secrecy and the letter’s limits

Alongside the request, Bernhard asks Leo not to reveal the letter to Emmi or tell her about his appeal. He acknowledges that he has violated her trust by going behind her back and reading her private correspondence, and says he could not face her if she learned what he had done. He also fears that disclosure would make both spouses hate themselves and each other. The request for secrecy therefore protects the marriage from one truth even as Bernhard asks Leo to intervene in another part of it.

Bernhard signs the message as Bernhard Rothner after describing it as the most excruciating letter he has ever written. The formal address and sign-off sit against the plea’s escalating intimacy and humiliation. His act of writing is not simply a demand: it exposes his vulnerability to the man he regards as an unreal competitor, while attempting to keep Emmi unaware of the means by which he has learned about the correspondence.

Significance in the correspondence

The letter stages a conflict between an imagined emotional world and the embodied reality Bernhard hopes will interrupt it. He assumes that a meeting can make Leo vulnerable and that a single encounter can close the relationship; those are Bernhard’s hopes, not outcomes established by the appeal itself. The request’s force comes from how much he risks conceding: he offers to accept what he fears in order to end the uncertainty and reclaim a place in his marriage.

Its secrecy makes the intervention ethically unstable. Bernhard asks Leo to act on information obtained by violating Emmi’s privacy, but also demands that the intervention remain hidden from her. In the email novel’s form, his message becomes another private document addressed to a participant in the correspondence. Bernhard is no longer only the husband outside that exchange: by writing to Leo, he enters its chain of messages, trying to make a written appeal accomplish what the imagined face-to-face meeting would accomplish in person.