Aphra Behn is regarded as England’s first professional writer. Her 1688 novel Oroonoko. Or the Royal Slave. A true History deals with the English overseas territories decades before Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). It was translated into German in Hamburg in 1709 and was subsequently widely read. The translation, made by a certain Magister Vischer, remains close to the original text, but semantically changes some nuances that should be emphasised. These include the conspicuous use of the terms „Europeans“ and „European women“, which Aphra Behn does not use with such clarity. Based on this and other examples, the article suggests how the German translation of the English source text, which was still published in the seventeenth century, could be considered an indicator of the early German Enlightenment at the beginning of the eighteenth century through subversive translation.