Kenneth Krauss's new drama on The White Rose Resistance Group, Eroica, will be performed as a stage reading on Saturday, December 19th at 7 pm at The Community Actors Theatre at 2957 54th St, San Diego, at the intersection of 54th St. and College Grove Drive. Seating is limited and there are no reservations; admission is free; free on-street parking and in the lot of Calvary Lutheran Church, located across 54th St. directly across from the theatre.
Kenneth Krauss retired as Drama Professor at the College of St. Rose in 2018; he’d written 4 shows that were produced and 2 reading off-off Broadway. He fled the snowbelt for San Diego, where during the Pandemic he finished a study of gender and sexuality in Casanova’s memoirs and became a full-time playwright. He has written comedies, dramas, plays with music, and 4 musicals. Many in the cast of this performance did a reading for Scripteasers on September 13th of this year of his dramedy, Streams of Starlight, at Lakeside Library.
Eroica is the first play written in English that connects his sexuality, long hidden by his family from the German people, with his political organizing and dissent. His older sister, Inge’s, book on The White Rose never mentions his 1937 trial on Paragraph 175 of the Nazi legal code and instead give his younger sister, Sophie, who came later into the group, the main role, which later plays and films reflect and this drama corrects.
Die Weiße Rose was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany led by five students and one Munich professor: Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, and Hans and Sophie Scholl. The group started an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign for active opposition to the Nazi regime, on 27 June 1942. Their activities ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.
Graf, Huber, Probst, Schmorell, and the Scholl siblings, alongside other members and supporters who carried and distributed the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi's Court; many were imprisoned and executed. Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, as well as Probst, were executed by guillotine four days after their arrest. During the trial, Sophie interrupted the judge multiple times. No defendants were given any opportunity to speak.
The group wrote, printed, and distributed pamphlets in the greater Munich region. Later secret carriers brought copies to other German cities. In July 1943, Allied planes dropped their final leaflet over Germany with the headline, “Manifesto of the Students of Munich” The White Rose authored 6 leaflets, which were multiplied and spread, in a total of about 15,000 copies. They denounced the Nazi's crimes and oppression, and called for resistance. They denounced the persecution and mass murder of the Jews. By the time of their arrest, the members of the White Rose were just about to establish contacts with other German resistance groups.
Event venue
Community Actor's Theatre, 2957 54th St, San Diego, CA 92105, United States
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