[4] For his doctorate he was supervised by Karl Vossler (who had also taught Victor Klemperer) at Munich[3] for a study of daily life and literature in Medieval Spain,[4] which was subsequently published.

[5] He moved to Marburg in April 1931, taking a post as an assistant at the university, and received his habilitation qualification a year later, this time for a piece of work entitled "The development of the bucolic in Spanish Literature",[4] for which he was supervised by Erich Auerbach.

Shortly after this politics intervened at the beginning of 1933 when the Nazi party took power and lost little time in imposing their version of a one-party dictatorship on Germany.

[6] War returned in 1939, and in August 1940 Krauss was conscripted into the army, ending up in a special company of simultaneous translators: this involved relocating to Berlin, although the work also included front-line assignments.

Krauss and his girlfriend, Ursula Goetze, now participated in a "sticker campaign" against a high-profile exhibition being held in the Lustgarten park in May/June 1942, which carried the ironic title "The Soviet Paradise".

As well as the incident involving the "sticker campaign", Krauss was condemned under the Law on extraordinary broadcast actions ("Verordnung über außerordentliche Rundfunkmaßnahmen") for having listened to, read and given publicity to "inflammatory articles" from abroad.

During his time in Plötzensee Werner Krauss was able to write, clandestinely, a satirical Roman à clef entitled "Die Passionen der halkyonischen Seele" ("The Passions of a Halcyon Soul"),[10] with an air-force officer (Harro Schulze-Boysen) as its principal protagonist.

[12] On his release Krauss made his way back to Marburg, where in 1945[2] or 1946[3] he finally received the professorship which the university had felt unable to confer on him during the Nazi years.

[2] The next year, in 1947, he accepted an invitation to take a professorship in Romance Philology at the Philology-History department of the Philosophy faculty at Leipzig University,[4] where according to one source he expected "a more consistent antifascism".

He became a member of the Saxony Academy of Sciences ("Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften") in 1949, and in 1951 took a professorship with a teaching chair at the Humboldt University of Berlin.