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The conflict of anarchism and literature played out in Kafka facilitates the inconclusive ending of the film, since by definition anarchism is not obliged to provide political alternatives to the power it opposes. The conflict is abstract enough to keep the story line detached from the historical situation in the city of Prague at the time the film was made, the collapse of an oppressive government with the leading participation of a writer [Vaclav Havel]. Communism rather than anarchism would have been the touchstone for evaluating the political significance of the seeming submission to authority in Kafka's work, an issue that has preoccupied literary critics for a long time. Soderbergh, however, has narrowed "Kafka's" case down to the moral question of how one should behave toward an atrocious superior force that is beyond understanding and hence impervious to counteraction. He has placed the writer in the milieu of the Boheme, where since the nineteenth century literature and anarchism have traditionally met. At a bar table the conspirators call "Kafka" to account...."