A flag is born

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Stage work
Original title: A flag is born
Author: Ben Hecht
Year of origin: 1946
Premiere: September 4, 1946
Location: Broadway, New York
Theatre: Alvin Theater
Genus: Extravaganza
Original language: English
Music: Kurt Weill

A Flag Is Born is a play in the form of an extravaganza (English Pageant ) by Ben Hecht from 1946, which campaigns for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in the ancient land of Israel. At the time the piece was published, the Mandate Palestine was under British administration. With a cast that included Paul Muni , Celia Adler and Marlon Brando , the play premiered on September 4, 1946 at the Alvin Theater on Broadway. It was staged by Luther Adler and the music was by Kurt Weill . A flag is bornwas produced by the American League for a Free Palestine , an Irgun organization led by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) to promote the Zionist idea.

contents

A Flag Is Born tells the story of three main characters: Tevye and Zelda are survivors of the Treblinka extermination camp (played on Broadway by established stars Paul Muni and Celia Adler) trying to get into British-administered Palestine. David (played by Marlon Brando) is an angry young survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp.

To begin with, on a Friday evening on their journey, Tevye and Zelda stop at a cemetery and begin to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath . Zelda lights candles on a broken tombstone. After Tevye has said the Sabbath prayer, he dreams of his hometown as it was before the destruction by the National Socialists. A dream sequence follows in which Tevye has visions of the biblical kings Saul and David . This alludes to a promise made by the Holy Land that goes back a long way and that is to be kept in the present as a modern state.

When Tevye wakes up, he finds that Zelda died that night. He recites the Kaddish , the Jewish funeral prayer , and then greets the Angel of Death, who has also come for him. He says goodbye to David. When David was thinking about suicide, three Jewish soldiers (representatives of the paramilitary Zionist organizations Haganah , Irgun and Lechi ) suddenly appeared and asked him to join them: "We are waiting for you, David." And declare that they are on the streets of Jerusalem , fight in the hills of Lebanon and the deserts of Judea "against the English, the cunning and mighty English". "We speak to them in a new Jewish language, the language of the gun" and "We promise to free our homeland from British clutches".

In the play's finale, David delivers a fiery Zionist speech, crosses a bridge into Palestine and hoists to the mixed sounds of Hatikvah (the later Israeli anthem) and gunfire in the background Tevye's prayer shawl as a makeshift flag and marches to war.

Zionist movement

A Flag Is Born was produced by the revisionist Zionist American League for a Free Palestine (ALFP) to gain financial and political support for Zionist causes, including the transportation of homeless Jews from Europe to Palestine. The AFLP spoke openly about its political motives - the promotional materials read: “ A Flag Is Born is no ordinary theater. It was not written to amuse or beguile. A Flag Is Born was written to raise funds for ships bringing Hebrews to Palestine ... and [to] arouse the American public to support the struggle for freedom and independence that is now being waged by the resistance in Palestine. "

When promoting the play, the Bergsons tried to equate the Zionist organizations in Palestine with the patriots of the American Revolution . The program's cover picture showed three Zionists - one with a rifle, one with a hoe, and one with a Zionist flag - portrayed in front of three idealized figures from the American Revolution. Through the slogan "It's 1776 in Palestine!" The members of the Jewish resistance were portrayed as modern Nathan Hales . "Taxation without representation" in Palestine alluded to Thomas Jefferson's sentence "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God". When Tevye dreams of addressing the United Nations, he compares the Palestine of the 1940s with the American colonies of the 1770s. The piece proved to be very popular with the public. Therefore, the Broadway performance was extended and performed in five other North American cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and Boston). It raised nearly a million dollars from ticket sales and fundraisers.

Brando had already been voted Broadway's Most Promising Actor for his role as a desperate veteran in Truckline Café , but the play had not been a commercial success and Brando was young, relatively unknown, and poorly funded. Brando believed that Holocaust survivors deserved a land of their own to live freely. He accepted the minimum wage from the Actor's Equity union so that more of the proceeds from the performance could go to Zionist causes, but also because he was given the opportunity to play with and learn from Paul Muni.

The sponsorship committee included many prominent figures, including composer Leonard Bernstein , writer Lion Feuchtwanger , New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer , and Eleanor Roosevelt .

Reception and effect

Queue outside the Alvin Theater, Broadway

The proceeds from the play were partly used to support the struggle for freedom in Palestine. Another project was equipping the Ben Hecht refugee ship . Public opinion in America was strongly anti-British and pro-Zionist influenced by the play and the subsequent arrest of the American occupation of the Ben Hecht by the British Navy.

The fight against segregation in Baltimore

In an early action by the civil rights movement, American human rights activists opposed to racial discrimination began boycotting theaters to oppose the practice of barring African Americans from attending the theater. Ben Hecht, who was involved in the boycott, and the committee moved the play from Washington to the Maryland Theater in Baltimore for this reason . A special train brought members of Congress to the performance. The American League for a Free Palestine and the NAACP civil rights movement took the opportunity to force the management of the Maryland Theater to repeal the racial segregation there (African Americans were only allowed to visit the balcony at the time) for the duration of the performance, which at the time was called Victory for civil rights was considered. This form of racial segregation was later discontinued in the Baltimore theaters.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Rafael Medoff: Ben Hecht's "A Flag is Born": A Play That Changed History. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, April 2004, accessed August 11, 2021.
  2. ^ Louis Rapaport: Shake Heaven & Earth - Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe. Gefen Publishing 1999, ISBN 965-229-182-X , p. 195.
  3. ^ A b Albert Wertheim: Staging the War: American Drama and World War II , Indiana University Press 2004, ISBN 0-253-34310-0 , p. 279.