Career
He was a son of the physician Ludwig Traube (1818-1876). Traube was born in Berlin, the son of a middle-class Jewish family, and studied at the universities of Munich and Greifswald. In 1883 he finished his Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation entitled Varia libamenta critica.
He finished his Habilitation in classical and medieval philology in 1888 with a part of his book on Carolingian poetry.
He became a professor in Munich in 1904 and in 1905 discovered he had leukemia, from which he died two years later.