But "Am Sonntag will mein Süsser mit mir segeln gehen" ("On Sunday I'll go sailing with my Sweetheart") and "Das gibt's nur einmal" ("It Happens Only Once"), became his better known work.
Gilbert was born in Berlin, and was a soldier during the last year of World War I, where he came in contact with socialist and communist ideas that the political awareness of the 1900s had aroused.
Jean Gilbert's operettas, Polnische Wirtschaft [de] (1909) and Die keusche Susanne (1910) were hugely successful and his song, "Pupchen, du bist mein Augenstern" became a hit.
In 1930 for the operetta Das Weisse Rössl (The White Horse Inn), Gilbert worked on the libretto and also included his own song, "Was kann der Sigismund dafür, dass er so schön ist?"
From there UFA contracted with Gilbert to make films, beginning with Die Drei von der Tankstelle, which inaugurated his long musical collaboration with Werner Richard Heymann with such hits as "Ein Freund, ein guter Freund", ("A Friend, a Good Friend"), and "Liebling, mein Herz läst dich grüssen" ("Darling, my heart sends you greetings").
The next years were spent in Vienna, where Gilbert learned the Viennese dialect and continued writing poetry as the Nazi influence gained strength until Austria welcomed Hitler in 1938.
There Gilbert set himself the task of learning English, especially the everyday language as spoken in the streets, with hopes of eventually reaching Broadway.
Meanwhile, Robert's father Jean Gilbert and his second family were also forced to flee from Nazi Germany, travelling first to Spain, then to England and finally Argentina.
Jean Gilbert found work as an orchestra conductor for Buenos Aires Radio in 1939, certainly a comedown from his earlier wealth and renown in Germany, but still a good position where he could use his musical talents.
One striking feature of Gilbert's interviews and appearances during this time was that there was no mention of the reason for his ten-year absence or of the Nazi murderous persecution of Jews.
Gilbert's Odyssey ends with an account of the returning dynamism of Germany's Economic Miracle with its author painfully aware that the rising computer generation was leaving him and his peers behind.
In the 1950s he entered a second marriage and, after the birth of the couple's son, Stefan, Gilbert moved with his new family to Locarno in Switzerland's Tessin region.
A former close boyhood friend, Frederick (Fritz) Loewe introduced Gilbert to his collaborator, Alan Jay Lerner, and that meeting resulted in a string of major hits – the German translations of Annie Get Your Gun, Hello Dolly, Gigi, My Fair Lady and Man of La Mancha.
A record of his work with titles of the nearly 400 songs he wrote as well as the five volumes of his poetry, and many personal letters can be found at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.