In Family of Spies, Christine Kuehn traces how her grandparents, father, aunt, and uncles had moved inexorably toward atrocity by succumbing to their insatiable desire for greater status, wealth, and national pride. As the memoir explains, the family first enters the Nazi world with dewy-eyed eagerness, but a series of unwise choices on the part of Otto and Ruth leave them vulnerable to cutthroat Nazi politics, necessitating their acceptance of a mission to work for Japanese intelligence. Through a chain of self-serving decisions, they lock themselves into a trajectory that leads inexorably toward a state of sheer moral collapse, with the glitter of power dazzling them to the point that they fail to foresee the damage ahead. At first, the promise of joining a victorious cause excites them, and then that excitement gives way to a luxurious life that ends in complete destruction. 

The start of this trajectory can be linked to the moment when Otto and Leopold first attend a Nazi rally during which Adolf Hitler promises to rebuild Germany’s strength. Extrapolating the likely details of the scene, the narrator describes them listening as Hitler declares, “One is either the hammer or the anvil. We confess that it is our purpose to prepare the German people again for the role of the hammer!” (42). Otto, whose aristocratic family has by this point lost its standing and whose business ventures have largely failed, sees the Nazi party as a chance to regain social and political relevance, on both a personal and a national level. He and Leopold enlist immediately, drawn in by a vision of restored power that masks the violence at the party’s core.

That early commitment soon shifts toward material reward. Flush with his own success in the Nazi party, Leopold invites his sister Ruth to a lavish Nazi party that kick-starts her affair with the highly ranked and innately dangerous Joseph Goebbels; while the young woman clearly enjoys the perks of the attentions she receives, the trappings of this lavish gala blend glamour with brutality, for her favored status lasts only as long as Goebbels remains ignorant of her half-Jewish heritage. His discovery of her background prompts the family’s move to Hawaii; thus, ironically, Ruth falls prey to the very ideology that she and her family have chosen to champion. 

However, the Kuehn family is nothing if not skilled at conducting mental gymnastics to combat the cognitive dissonance inherent in their choices and the various paradoxes of their existence. As the author explains:

[Leopold’s] ability to compartmentalize, to ignore, had to be a defense mechanism […]. Otto and Friedel had that same innate ability to compartmentalize diametrically opposed forces in their life. Get paid to spy by the Japanese as part of an effort to destroy the United States, but live a life taking full advantage of everything an American paradise had to offer. Take part in Nazi directives of violence against the Jews, but protect their Jewish daughter. (92)

In short, the family embraces espionage because of the dire straits of Ruth’s situation, and because of the more mundane lure of money. The Japanese government offers Otto a contract worth the equivalent of $680,000 today, which finances the family’s extravagant lifestyle in Hawaii. Yet their lavish parties and high social status mask the reality that this wealth comes from work that is designed to help an attack on their host country. Like their stolid habit of “compartmentalizing” their own thoughts, this rich lifestyle makes their own moral decline and harmful endeavors far easier to rationalize.

As Christine Kuehn relates, the destruction that follows sweeps through every branch of the family, cementing the book’s implicit condemnation of ambitions that dally in the realm of moral corruption. In recompense for his work, Otto receives a death sentence that is commuted to 50 years of hard labor, and although he is released early, he nonetheless returns to Germany as a broken man who soon dies in obscurity. Likewise, Leopold dies in the final days of the Battle of Berlin, fighting for a cause that has already been lost. Hans, who carries deep trauma from his childhood, struggles for the rest of his life and later dies by suicide. Even Friedel and Ruth are never fully free of the fear and deprivation that first dogged them in postwar Germany. As the author reflects on the various fates of her family members, she gains a deeper sense of respect for her father, Eberhard, who was so overwhelmed by the family’s past that he cut almost all ties. In the end, the wealth and power that once pulled the Kuehns forward leave them all in much worse straits, and in essence, Otto and Friedel’s aggressive ambitions eventually lead to the family’s collapse.