The modernist awareness of contingency is variously prefigured in German narrative discourse around 1800. In the course of the accounts of their lives, the characters in the novels »Agathon« (Wieland), »Siebenkäs« (Jean Paul), and »Godwi« (Brentano) are repeatedly confronted with coincidences befalling them, while the texts themselves are full of reflections indicating that the order and meaning they impose on the material could always have been different. The study examines the various modes of enactment employed in connection with narrative contingency, using the contingency concept to take a new perspective on the major literary epoch around 1800.