THE MAHAGONNY NOTES are characterized by an exuberant sense of living in an age of transition: “dieser (so kostbaren) Übergangszeit” (GBA 21:143). “Nach meiner Ansicht,” Brecht wrote at the time of Mann ist Mann, “ist es sicher, daß der Sozialismus, und zwar der revolutionäre, das Gesicht unseres Landes noch zu unseren Lebzeiten verändern wird” (GBA 21:145). The picture is one of a society on the brink of revolution and, culturally, of a bourgeois institution not yet under the control of the progressive class, but whose appropriation is imminent, hence the thematic concerns of works like Die Maßnahme, Kuhle Wampe, and Die Mutter. This is coupled with an optimistic picture of an embryonic Marxist theater designed to attack the base. If the Mahagonny notes are colored by any sense of historical crisis, the analysis that they contain nevertheless focuses on the “Theater-Apparat” itself and on diagnosing the culinary wares and unproductive audience response Epic Theater needed to combat. As Kobel has pointed out, Brecht argues as if the audience of Aristotelian theater took no political views to the theater with them (Kobel 1992, 136). But the real problem in the early 1930s was that a large portion of potential theater audiences was of the radical political right. Yet we find little indication in Brecht's theoretical writings that the real enemy was by then not bourgeois culture, but National Socialism's totalizing program. Indeed, as the Brecht Handbuch states, National Socialism was a nearly nonexistent theme in Brecht's writings on politics and society until early 1933 (BHB 4:129).