Professor Frank Krause

Staff details

Research interests: Enlightenment, Expressionism, narratives of the First World War, and the history of smell motifs.

Frank has written on German literature of the Enlightenment (Brockes, Gottsched, Moritz, Schnabel and Wieland), literary Expressionism (Einstein, El Hor, Heym, Kaiser, Kokoschka, Latzo, Trakl and von Unruh), English, French and German narratives of the First World War, and the history of smell motifs in German and other literatures (Gide, Maria Lazar and Thomas Mann). Most recently, he wrote a book about the ways in which German literature since the Enlightenment has explored the significance of smells in sacred contexts .

Academic qualifications

  • Dr. phil., Ruhr-Universität Bochum 1999
  • Erstes Staatsexamen (Lehramt für die Sekundarstufe II), Ruhr-Universität Bochum 1989

Teaching and supervision

As a Professor Emeritus, Frank no longer teaches on programmes at Goldsmiths.

As a Professor Emeritus, Frank is no longer involved in programmes at Goldsmiths.

Research interests

Olfactory motifs are powerful devices of emotional communication, and their contribution to rhetoric effects of literary texts deserves the attention of literary historians. However, the weighty contribution made by odour imagery to our moods, emotions and affects goes largely unnoticed, which accounts for the comparatively late attention paid to smell in research on the significance of sensory images in literature. Literary-historical studies have only recently begun to explore pertinent themes, problems, views and techniques in more breadth and depth. For an introduction, see https://www.iudicium.de/katalog/86205-629.pdf.

My recent book explores the innovative ways in which German literature from the early Enlightenment to the present has explored the significance of smell in sacred contexts; see https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783111112770/html?lang=de.

My current research is focussed on literary depictions of smell pertaining to work-specific contexts from comparatist angles.

Publications and research outputs

Book

Krause, Frank. 2023. Geruch und Glaube in der Literatur. Selbst und Natur in deutschsprachigen Texten von Brockes bis Handke. Berlin: De Gruyter / Düsseldorf University Press. ISBN 9783111108568

Krause, Frank. 2016. Geruchslandschaften mit Kriegsleichen. Deutsche, englische und französische Prosa zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Academic. ISBN 9783847106128

Krause, Frank. 2015. Literarischer Expressionismus. V&r Unipress. ISBN 978-3847103639

Edited Book

Herold, Katharina and Krause, Frank, eds. 2021. Smell and Social Life. Aspects of English, French and German Literature (1880-1939). Munich: iudicium. ISBN 9780854572809

Kanz, Christine and Krause, Frank, eds. 2015. Zwischen Demontage und Sakralisierung. Revisionen des europäischen Familienmodells in der europäischen Moderne (1880-1945). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ISBN 978-3-8260-5674-1

Krause, Frank, ed. 2010. Expressionism and Gender / Expressionismus und Geschlecht. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress. ISBN 3899717171

Edited Journal

Krause, Frank and Eichhorn, Kristin, eds. 2023. Expressionismus 18 (2023): Riechen und Gerüche, Expressionismus, (18). 2363-5592

Book Section

Krause, Frank. 2024. Spätexpressionismus. In: Robert Krause and Maren Lickhardt, eds. Handbuch Weimarer Republik. Literatur und Kultur. Stuttgart: J B Metzler Verlag. ISBN 9783476059505

Krause, Frank. 2024. Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Nature Writing. In: Gabriele Dürbeck and Christine Kanz, eds. German-Language Nature Writing from Eighteenth Century to the Present: Controversies, Positions, Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37-57. ISBN 9783031509094

Krause, Frank. 2024. Sinnliche Neigung und geistige Bindung. Zur Komposition von Richard Dehmels Weib und Welt (1896). In: Nikolas Immer and Julia Ilgner, eds. Richard-Dehmel-Handbuch. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Article

Krause, Frank. 2024. Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ Physico-Theology of Smell. ESPES. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, 13(1), pp. 48-63. ISSN 1339-1119

Krause, Frank. 2023. Avantgarde, Olfaktion und Vernetzung: Die Vergiftung (1920) von Maria Lazar (1895-1948). Zagreber germanistische Beiträge, 32, pp. 97-114. ISSN 1330-0946

Krause, Frank. 2023. Leichengeruch im Ersten Weltkrieg. Zur Inszenierung affektiver Höhepunkte abstoßender Weltbeziehungen im literarischen Expressionismus. Expressionismus(18), pp. 45-58. ISSN 2363-5592

Printed Ephemera

Krause, Frank. 2015. The Phallic Woman as Sacred Mother in Plays by Kokoschka and von Unruh: Ritualistic Body Phantasms in Expressionist Approaches to Gender.

Krause, Frank. 2009. Verfremdete Unterhaltung: Probleme und Aussichten der Georg-Kaiser-Rezeption [Defamiliarized Entertainment. Problems and prospects of Georg-Kaiser reception].

Professional projects

Frank has also given lectures in museums. On a Study Day at Tate Liverpool’s Exhibition Portraying a Nation: Germany (1919-1933) in 2017, he gave a paper on ‘The Oral Sense in Extremis: German, French, and English Narratives of the Great War’; and at the Wenzel-Hablik Museum in Itzehoe (Germany), he presented the lecture ‘Geruch der Utopie: Messianische Baumeister des Expressionismus’ in 2020, a recording of which was subsequently broadcast on local radio (OK Westküste).

Conferences and talks

2020: ‘“sie werden ... in dionysischen Sandalen stinken”. Zur Problemgeschichte von Geruchsmotiven im Werk von Carl Einstein’
Paper presented at conference on Carl Einstein im Kontext neuer Avantgardetheorien (Institut Moderne im Rheinland an der Universität Düsseldorf)

2018: ‘Artenkenntnis und Religiosität: Gerüche der heiligen Natur bei Brockes (1680-1747) und Voß (1751-1826)’
Paper presented at annual conference of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft in Hildesheim, Germany

2018: ‘Smell-Sound Synaesthesia as Revelatory Medium: A Brief History with Emphasis on German Literature (1900-1930)’
Paper presented at conference on Mediality of Smells (University of Oxford)

2016: 'Methods of Pacifist Writing: Andreas Latzko’s Anti-War Prose (1917-1918)'
Paper presented at conference on Pacifist and Anti-Militarist Writing in German, 1889–1929. From Bertha von Suttner to Erich Maria Remarque (IMLR, University of London)

2014: 'Leichengeruch in der Literatur über den Ersten Weltkrieg (1914-1933)'
Paper presented at conference on Intellectuals and the Great War (Ghent University)

2017: O What a Disgusting War! The Oral Sense in Extremis: Stories of the Great War
Inaugural Lecture

2023: Von Grünau nach Gansewinckel. Wilhelm Raabes profane Aneignung kultisch inszenierter Gerüche
Paper presented at conference on Smell in German Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Cologne University)