Karen von Kunes presents readers with an intriguing hypothesis: that Milan Kundera's enduring thematic concerns can be traced to a traumatic event in his life that occurred on March 14, 1950. On that day, according to a 2008 article published in the right-of-center weekly Respekt based on then newly available police files, a twenty-year old student, Milan Kundera (then serving as head of his dormitory) stated (udal) that another student (Miroslav Dlask) had told him that a young male visitor had left a suitcase (kufr) with a third student, Iva Militká. A resulting police investigation of the suitcase revealed only harmless objects (hats, sunglasses), but in the process Militká revealed to the police that its owner, Miroslav Dvořáček, had deserted his air-force unit and had defected to the west. Dvořáček, who had just returned to Czechoslovakia on a spying mission, was arrested that evening; he served fourteen years hard labor. As von Kunes points out, Respekt’s headline—Udání Milana Kundery (Milan Kundera's Informing)—was misleading; the Czech verb has two different meanings, udat, že (declare that) and udat koho (inform on someone), and the police report clearly indicates the former, that Kundera was reporting a suspicious suitcase. Kundera, in 2008, denied any involvement, claimed that he knew neither Dvořáček nor Militká, and said that he was mystified by his name's appearance in the police report.

Nonetheless, von Kunes presents plausible circumstantial evidence that Kundera was acquainted with both Dlask and Militká in the early 1950s and she clearly believes he did report the suitcase. As the Czech writers who came to Kundera's defense in 2008 pointed out, as a dormitory head Kundera would have risked severe punishment had he not reported the suitcase, once Dlask, an ardent communist, had specifically told him about it; Kundera had been expelled from the Communist Party only a year earlier. Von Kunes goes on to argue that recurrent imagery (suitcases, sunglasses, hats), chance encounters, and the sequential occurrence of “sex-betrayal-denouncing ” (137), as well as negative portrayals of women who are naïve idealists and a preoccupation with artists’ immortality as embodied in their works (rather than in their personal biographies) are all related in Kundera's novels to his conscious or subconscious denial of his unlucky involvement in this arrest, and the trauma and suppressed guilt that he bears.

Von Kunes explores how important themes in Kundera's works (personal and political betrayals, the role of coincidence in life, memory and forgetting, attraction to power and to idyllic visions of the future) are related to details of what became known as Kauza Kundera (the Kundera case). In tracing objects and motifs, she moves fluidly among Kundera's eleven novels, his plays, and his literary essays—tracing the recurrences of suitcases, sunglasses, and hats. In spite of the impressive number of details that she correlates across these works, whether this constitutes a proof of her thesis is likely to remain controversial. These items do recur in Kundera's works, but von Kunes’ efforts to show that they appear at crucial moments, or that they bear symbolic meanings, are only sometimes convincing. Other things (spas, pills, letters) also recur frequently and, as far as the behavior of characters living under the communist regime goes, there were many examples beyond his own personal actions that Kundera could have drawn upon. Von Kunes also advances ideas about Kundera's oeuvre reflecting the psychological stages of denial, and about his attraction to certain philosophers’ concepts.

In some of her analyses, for example in her treatment of Life is Elsewhere, the novel's narrative itself provides more convincing evidence than the recurrence of particular objects alone. In that novel, police searches, arrests, and defection are all story elements. The novel's protagonist, Jaromil, becomes a dedicated believer in what Kundera will later term the communist idyll of a utopian future because of frustrations in his own erotic life which later leads him to denounce his lover and her brother, resulting in their arrest. This does match some details in Kauza Kundera (Dlask and Militká were lovers and married soon after; Dlask allegedly asked Kundera to report the suitcase, perhaps because he was jealous of her male visitor). Thus, the narrative arc may be better evidence than the recurrence of an aktovka (briefcase) in Jaromil's dreams about his revolutionary alter ego—and it is an aktovka, not a kufr. More importantly, all of the philosophical and psychological issues in Kundera's work that von Kunes explores no doubt have multiple sources in his life experiences, not just in this one disputed event, as well as in paths chosen by others and not by Kundera himself. As von Kunes often emphasizes, Kundera's legacy will be the complexity of his vision of the human experience and his innovations in the structure of the novel, not the details of his biography, as he himself has long insisted.