One goal of natural language generation is to produce coherent text that presents information in a logical order. In this paper, we show that topological fields, which model high-level clausal structure, are an important component of local coherence in German. First, we show in a sentence ordering experiment that topological field information improves the entity grid model of Barzilay and Lapata (2008) more than grammatical role and simple clausal order information do, particularly when manual annotations of this information are not available. .