Gottlieb Rabener

Who was Gottlieb Rabener?

Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, was a German writer of prose satires. He was born at Wachau near Leipzig, and died at Dresden.

In 1741 he made his debut as satirist in Schwabe's Belustigungen des Verstandes und Witzes, and was subsequently a contributor to the Bremer Beitrage. Rabener's satires are mainly levelled at the follies of the middle classes.

The papers which he published in the Bremer Beitrage were subsequently collected in a Sammlung satirischer Schriften, to which two volumes were added in 1755.

Rabener is especially notorious for his parodic dissertation, Hinkmars von Repkow Noten Ohne Text, which levels a snide charge against the futility and bankruptcy of the practice of footnoting, by consisting entirely of footnotes itself. Rabener cavalierly claimed that since footnotes and endnotes seemed to have become the key to winning lasting authorial fame, he had accordingly composed his dissertation entirely in notes, and left it to others to produce the text he had annotated proleptically.