Clearing up an old question

While being interviewed on the campus of a venerable East coast college, I was asked by a renown old French professor what courses I might be able to teach undergraduates. Like any other nervous candidate, I was prepared for this question. So I took a deep breath and slowly recited the list of class I had already taught, ending with the German Enlightenment. After a slight pause, the French professor, asked me with a skeptical smile, "Oh, I didn't think there was a German Enlightenment?"

Apparently this question still worries some. T.J. Reed's newest book Mehr Licht in Deutschland: Eine kleine Geschichte der Aufklärung is marketed by C. H. Beck, another venerable old institution, as an answer to this old concern.

"Die deutsche Variante der Aufklärung wird im Ausland gern unterschätzt, falls sie überhaupt als kohärente Bewegung zur Kenntnis genommen wird. Im Lande selbst hatte sie lange eine schlechte Presse, denn es gab eine Tradition, bei der man dem Grundsatz klaren Selbstdenkens und individueller Freiheit "tiefere", "deutschere" Werte vorgezogen hat, mit schlimmen, auch politischen Folgen.

T.J. Reed, intimer Kenner der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, zeichnet in einem großen historischen Essay die Geschichte der deutschen Aufklärung im europäischen Zusammenhang nach."

http://www.chbeck.de/productview.aspx?product=28329&PTBUCH=LESEPROBE

After all the many critiques of the Enlightenment, after all the answers written against and for Kantian ethics, epistemology and aesthetics, after all the horrors ascribed to the German Enlightenment, it is amazing that one could still wonder whether there ever was such a movement? It almost seems like a sophistic trick to claim so, "Well, you see there never was a German Enlightenment. It is strictly a French or English problem, like colonialism…"