This extensive study, published as an afterword to the German translation of Angelos Terzakis's historical novel Princess Ysabeau (1945), presents the author's so-called 'turn to the past' as a continuation of his efforts to rethink (urban) realism along the lines of Jacque Rivière's concept of the 'roman d'aventure' (cf. Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier). At the same time, Terzakis drew on Benedetto Croce's aesthetic theory to redefine the 'historical' as a mere morphological or technical characterisation that does not separate the literary work from contemporary expression. Borrowing from the concept of the 'roman d'aventure', the idea that the author embarks on the adventure of writing without a predetermined plan, Terzakis thus had to constantly readjust historical analogies in order to grasp the rapidly changing contemporary realities of the Second World War. The 'contemporary historicism' of this historical novel involved a seven-year 'adventure' of writing, during which the present sensibility of time invoked the historical past in order to rearrange its meanings and transform it into a vivid 'present-past'.