Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener (1714-1771), German satirist, was born on the 17th of September 1714 at Wachau near Leipzig, and died at Dresden on the 22nd of March 1771. In 1741 he made his debut as satirist in Schwabe's Belustigungen des Verstandes and Witzes, and was subsequently a contributor to the Bremer Beitrage. Rabener's satires are in prose and mainly levelled at the follies of the middle classes. The papers which he published in the Bremer Beitrdge were subsequently collected in a Sammlung satirischer Schriften (2 vols., 1751), to which two volumes were added in 1755.
Rabener's Siimtliche Werke appeared in 6 vols. in 1 ?77; the edition by E. Ortlepp (1839) also contains his correspondence, first published by C. F. Weisse in 1772. See P. Richter, Rabener and Liscow (1884), and D. Jacoby in Allg. Deutsche Biographic (1888).
