Logo

18 Facts About Siegfried Trebitsch

1.

Siegfried Trebitsch was an Austrian playwright, translator, novelist and poet.

2.

Siegfried Trebitsch is known for translations of French writers, especially Georges Courteline.

3.

Siegfried Trebitsch identified himself as a Lutheran when he registered for military service.

4.

Siegfried Trebitsch 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.

5.

Siegfried Trebitsch became the sole German translator of Shaw during his lifetime.

6.

Siegfried Trebitsch took up his residence in Vienna, where he built the prestigious "Villa Trebitsch" designed by Ernst Gotthilf.

7.

Siegfried Trebitsch 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.

8.

Siegfried Trebitsch was a close friend of music critic Julius Korngold, father of Erich Korngold.

9.

Siegfried Trebitsch once suggested to him that one of his translations, a play called Die stille Stadt would make a good opera.

10.

Siegfried Trebitsch had agreed with Gregori, describing Arthur's work as "amateurish" and suggesting that he suffered from "megolamania and paranoia".

11.

Siegfried Trebitsch continued to live in Vienna until the 1938 Anschluss, when Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany.

12.

Siegfried Trebitsch fled to Paris, where he was awarded an honorary French citizenship in 1939 in recognition of his promotion of French culture in Germany.

13.

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

14.

Siegfried Trebitsch applied for an immigration visa to the United States in June 1941, as a precaution, but with Allied victory this was unnecessary.

15.

Siegfried Trebitsch remained in Zurich for the rest of his life.

16.

Siegfried Trebitsch visited Shaw after the war, but when he planned a second visit in 1948, the irritable Shaw wrote "do not come", later writing that European ideas of intimacy were considered "sentimental nonsense" in England.

17.

Siegfried Trebitsch was responsible for the translation and first production of Shaw's last full-length play, Buoyant Billions which was first performed in German in Siegfried Trebitsch's new home, Zurich, under the title Zu viel Geld.

18.

In 1951 Siegfried Trebitsch published an autobiography, Chronik eines Lebens, which was published in English, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, two years later.