Though prolific as a writer in various genres, he was best known for his German translations, especially of the works of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, with whom he kept up a long and detailed correspondence.

[1] He entered the silk trade business of his stepfather Leopold, where he remained until 1903 when he took a year out for personal study and for travels across Europe and North Africa.

While in England he personally sought out Bernard Shaw, offering to translate his works and help build the playwright's reputation in Europe.

[2][3] His last full-length play Buoyant Billions was first performed Zürich, to which Trebitsch had moved during World War II.

In 1923 Shaw rewarded Trebitsch for his efforts by translating and adapting his play Frau Gitta's Sühne into English, as Jitta's Atonement.

He married in 1907 to the Hungarian Princess Antoinette Engalitscheff, the widow of a Russian Grand Duke who had been killed in 1904 fighting the Japanese.

He once suggested to him that one of his translations, a play called Die stille Stadt (The Silent City) would make a good opera.

Trebitsch's own original works of this period are comparable to those of Franz Werfel, who dominated the Viennese cultural life in the 1930s[citation needed].

Despite being aware that his Jewish ethnicity would now be a problem for him, according to Blanche Patch, who knew him, he and his wife did not at first react: At first they did not take much notice, but one day, when they were motoring home, they were stopped and their car was confiscated.

He also attempted to raise funds by unsuccessfully claiming royalties for The Chocolate Soldier, a German operetta based on Arms and the Man.

In the words of Samuel A. Weiss, "Trebitsch went to his bank, retrieved the heavy bundle of correspondence, and suffered a heart attack.