In his memoirs The Speckled People (2003), Irish author Hugo Hamilton recreates his German mother's past during the Third Reich as if it were a “black and white film” (Hamilton 2003). The multilingual child, who can be considered a specific figure of enunciation on account of the acuity of his metalinguistic awareness (Cazden 1974, Anokhina 2015), is recreated from afar by the adult author. This article aims to contribute to academic readings of Hamilton (Ní Éigeartaigh 2010, Depner 2014) by arguing that the originality of the self-narrative deployed around an autobiographical topos (the telling of the maternal inheritance) relies on a novel intermediality. Within the book space, Hamilton puts into film both the personal history of his mother, whose family fought against Nazism, and the history of Germany, perceived from a distance in a double linguistic and diasporic otherness. The images of Germany emerging from this hybrid medium are inserted throughout the autobiographical narrative. They may leave a stronger impression on the reader than the main body of these otherwise rather typically Irish memoirs.
