For two centuries historiography and the novel have been developing in competition with one another in many respects. At the same time, they are both compelled to confirm the narrated event in a more detailed manner than before. The reasons for this lie in the fact that the educational advantage of the author over the reader is diminishing. Furthermore, as soon as the responsibility for the course of history is no longer attributed to individuals but rather to collective or impersonal historic forces, new patterns of representation become necessary for the historiographer and the novelist alike. They have responded to this emerging crisis of narration in various ways: by means of specialization, through pluralization of perspective, through description of structure rather than narration of events, and finally, through a radical avowal of the subjective judgment of the depicted events. The portion that any historiography shares with fiction as well as the present -and future - oriented character of history represented in the novel are thus legitimated.