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December 1989, Romania – a culture steeped in secrecy-fuelled paranoia is reflected in the family of six-year-old Adam Stan, whose father is missing and no one concedes to even talk about it. In the first of two sections of 2, a novel, through the eyes of Adam the child, the narrative explores the fall of Ceaușescu's regime and the incandescent bouts of hope brought on by the first Romanian democratic summer, but overshadowed by the presence of an absent father. Adam keenly experiences the joys and injustices of private and public life in both urban and rural Romanian landscapes, before he is forced to emigrate with his mother to the United States. The latter half of the novel sees the adult Adam return to his native Romania after an absence of over two decades, having been reunited with his father and fully assimilated into American life. Adam’s first impressions are of a country still in social and political turmoil, but his Romanian senses are dulled, his outlook cynical, his father’s prohibitive voice never far from his mind. However, the seemingly new scenery and the people he meets end up exposing forbidden memories which prompt Adam’s curiosity for coming to terms with his family’s past. Dualities construct the framework of Adam’s journey: innocence and experience, child- and adulthood, nationhood and otherness, (post)communism and capitalism, personal and national trauma, culture and identity. 2, a novel is a story about family, displacement, language, but most of all about finding a sense of self despite the ambivalent responsibility that comes with inheriting one’s history.

This diploma thesis deals with the problem of identity in the novel by contemporary Czech writer Pavel Brycz The Long Lost Glory of the Patriarchy. It emerges from the concept of identity as a process of understanding one's self, the meaning of one's life, one's awareness of his place in an individual image of the world. Based on analysis of characters we try to show how Pavel Brycz portrays various aspects of identity (national, personal, social, professional, gender). Structurally, the thesis is divided into two parts: the first one is devoted to the basic characteristics of identity and represents the generalization of various concepts of identity from the point of view of philosophy, psychology, sociology and literary theory; the second part deals with the analysis of the characters of Brycz's novel The Long Lost Glory of the Patriarchy, which shows that each character carries a certain distinctive identity.

This thesis concerns the function of fiction in the creation of an historical myth and the uses that that myth is put to in a number of periods and differing régimes. Its case study is the popular myth of August the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, as a man of extraordinary sexual prowess and the ruler over a magnificent, but frivolous, court in Dresden. It examines the origins of this myth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and its development up to the twenty-first century in German history writing, fiction, art, and media. The image August created for himself in the art, literature, and festivities of his court as an ideal ruler of extremely broad cultural and intellectual interests and high political ambitions and abilities linked him closely with eighteenth-century notions of galanterie. This narrowed the scope of his image later, especially as nineteenth-century historians selected fictional sources and interpreted them as historical sources to present August as an immoral political failure. Although nineteenth-century popular writers exhibited a more varied response to August’s historical role, the negative historiography continued to resonate in later history writing. Ironically, the myth of August the Strong represented an opportunity in the GDR in creating and fostering a sense of identity, first as a socialist state with historical and cultural links to the east, and then by examining Prusso-Saxon history as a uniquely (East) German issue. Finally, the thesis examines the practice of historical re-enactment as it is currently employed in a number of variations on German TV and in literature, and its impact on historical knowledge. The thesis concludes that, while narrative forms are necessary to history and fiction, and fiction is a necessary part of presenting history, inconsistent combinations of the two can undermine the projects of both.