Gottlieb Rabener

Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener (17 September 1714 – 22 March 1771), was a German writer of prose satires and publicist of the Enlightenment.

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.

[1] The papers which he published in the Bremer Beitrage were subsequently collected in a Sammlung satirischer Schriften (2 vols., 1751), to which two volumes were added in 1755.

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.

People like Dr. Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Paine were influenced by the Enlightenment, it could be said Rabener and other writers of his time were a driving force behind this movement.