A good Irish German: In praise of Hugo Hamilton’s mother

Over the last ten years Hugo Hamilton (born 1953) has emerged as one of the major contemporary Irish novelists; for Bernard O'Donoghue in a review of his recent novel Disguise he is even “one of the most important writers of our time.” Hamilton's success is, at least in part, due to the new and unique perspective he has added to Irish writing in English: born into an Irish-German family and an enforced German- and Irish-speaking home environment he has made this rather unusual upbringing the starting point for his extensive creative reflections about issues of identity and belonging. His work also reflects extensively on the nature of the special relationship between Ireland and Germany. In doing this he has also helped to move the issue of interculturality, or “cultural hyphenation,” closer to the center of literary concerns within an increasingly multi-cultural, globalized Ireland. Many of Hamilton's novels are either set in Germany or contain German characters. Most pertinent to our present concern is the figure of Hamilton's mother, arguably the central character in the author's hugely successful autobiographical account of his childhood, The Speckled People (2003). To this he added three years later a second volume of memoirs entitled The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). While The Speckled People mainly covers Hamilton's childhood years, the sequel, set in the early 1970s, expands the last two chapters in the first volume into a full-length book, describing the adolescent years up to the author's eventual departure for Berlin in 1974.