The hotel motif
In this book, hotels represent close proximity to power. As the title suggests, Dite serves many political powers, so then when he opens his own hotel, and John Steinbeck walks in, that's like Bohumil Hrabal tipping his hat to Steinbeck as a powerful story-teller. Because Dite's greatest passion is fine service and running a hotel, he represents an admirer of power. He doesn't long for power of his own; he just wants to serve.
The symbolic Ethiopian award
There is a huge moment in the novel when the Dite waits on the famous emperor of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Salassie I, who was the emperor there for decades and decades. He awards Dite a medal for his excellent service. This is significant because by the time the novelist wrote this novel (1971), there was a movement of Christian mystics called Rastafarians who started worshiping that specific emperor as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. So from a literary perspective, receiving a medal from the emperor of Ethiopia means that he is an excellent servant. When none of his acquaintances or friends care about the award, that is a symbol that his culture does not prize humble service.
John Steinbeck
There is a blatant allusion to John Steinbeck in the novel. Steinbeck is a writer himself, perhaps one of the most famous authors to ever life, responsible for works like Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck is himself a symbol in the novel, but to interpret the symbol is difficult without understanding Steinbeck's writing. Essentially, he is a dark, powerful writer whose stories are often religious and complex. With that in mind, Hrabal's allusion indicates that his own novel belongs in the same camp.
The Nazi sympathy
Dite is an interesting character. He doesn't like the Nazis at all, but he likes a girl named Lise who happens to be an avid Nazi supporter. For some reason this never strikes him as important enough to prevent them being a family, so perhaps this symbolizes the European unawareness of the horrors of WWII while they were happening (for instance, the Jewish Holocaust was not known about; in this novel, Dite earns a fortune by finding an unowned Jewish stamp collection—meaning he literally profits from the Holocaust, unknowingly). However, the Nazi motif also suggests that Dite does not believe political ideologies are important enough to warrant all the military combat of the 20th century. He still, disturbingly, thinks Nazis are lovable.
The Jewish stamp collection and quarry hotel
There is a set of twin images offered in the novel: Dite finding an abandoned briefcase full of collectors stamps (the briefcase obviously belongs to a Jewish man), and a hotel that Dite buys with the money from selling the stamps, a hotel which he builds in a rock quarry. These images work together to show that Dite benefitted from WWII and the Holocaust, literally. Although he does time for his complicity with regard to the Nazis, he gets to serve that sentence in luxury. This suggests that many people profited in similar ways from other people's suffering during war.
