Beethoven In Stalingrad

Beethoven In StalingradSpotlites Hanover Street


The Venue is small and warm well lit and well attended actor Jasper Arin sets the scene, dressed in period German soldier clothes of 1940’s Germany, he performs the voice of many soldiers who wrote to loved ones and family members, these letters never reached their destination as outgoing mail was intercepted to view the morale of German soldiers only 2% of the soldiers were positive toward the war, the German minister of propaganda ordered the letters to be hidden from the German public.

Soldiers lament their situation, one being in love and missing their family, arguments with a father, while he finds his god in churches and in song, out in Stalingrad, his son had no god in his heart, and cries when the images of burning Russian soldiers he has shot haunts him in the silence of the night.

All these stories so passionately told by our storyteller takes you from this venue to 1940’s Russia the haunting score of Beethoven’s Apassionata is expertly played by former chamber musician Ian Peaston

Culture Coroner Rating 5 Stars



The battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia, on the eastern border of Europe.

Marked by constant close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as the single largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the German Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II; German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses.

The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in late summer 1942, using the 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble. The fighting degenerated into building-to-building fighting, and both sides poured reinforcements into the city. By mid-November 1942, the Germans had pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones generally along the west bank of the Volga River.

On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian forces protecting the German 6th Army’s flanks. The Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler ordered that the army stay in Stalingrad and make no attempt to break out; instead, attempts were made to supply the army by air and to break the encirclement from the outside. Heavy fighting continued for another two months. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition and food. The remaining elements of the 6th Army surrendered. The battle lasted five months, one week, and three days.


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