The discussions on community emerging at the outset of the twentieth century are shaped by two major influences: On the one hand, there are the contributions of early German Sociology inspired by Ferdinand Tönnies and his famous proposal of a dichotomic opposition of community and society. On the other hand, we encounter the image of an archaic community as an immediate, powerful presence evoked in some discourses of cultural Zionism which in their turn also go back to Tönnies’ distinction. In his early writings before 1914, Kafka was preoccupied with these discourses on community. In his later works, in particular in texts from his octave booklet (dating from 1917 and later) which evoke an imaginary China, Kafka also draws on contemporary debates on community in the shape of colonial discourses on China. Yet, he puts these notions into question, in order to interrogate the concept of community in its clearest and most general form, beyond the dichotomy in which it had been conceived by Tönnies.