Vienna Dolorosa

By Mykola Dementiuk

Set in Vienna,Austria on March 12,1938,the entire story takes place the day Hitler "invades" Austria,formerly part of Germany.At the center of the story is a hotel doubling as a brothel.the hotel... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Perfect Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0975858157
• ISBN13: 9780975858158
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Synergy Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant But Not Easy

I've lived all my life in Tornado Alley. Hundreds of times I've felt the heavy oppression of motionless air, watched greenish-black clouds pile up on the horizon, and known that something terrible, beyond my control, was developing. Vienna Dolorosa levied the same sense of foreboding. The story takes place in a single day in 1938, at various locations in Vienna on the last day before the Nazi takeover. The majority of the action occurs in the Hotel Redl, a down-at-heels hotel saved from complete failure by the advent of an intriguing, intelligent creature named Friska Bielinska. But Friska is not quite what she appears to be, and neither is the Hotel Redl. The Redl has tourist rooms but it also has a secret: it's a brothel for men who like boys dressed as girls. The story is told through the denizens of the hotel/brothel. These people include a brown-shirted Nazi official who becomes the victim of the most hideously vicious attack you will ever read, something for which I was as unprepared as he was. There is a street urchin named Petya who is a survivor of poverty and abuse, who sells himself to live. Petya is clever, tough, and surprisingly sweet. Another is a buxom hotel maid who likes women though she delights in teasing men. Others are: the owner of the hotel, an aging dandy, and a Jewish tourist couple. Most of all there is Friska. Friska is slim, attractive, and feminine in her manners and attire. Adversity in her own life has made her compassionate, someone who cares about people, whether they are customers or her boy/girls. And she is a he. Friska is referred to throughout as "she" because, as we would say today, she identifies as a woman. If the story had been set in the 21st century instead of 1938 I suspect the author would have made her transgendered instead of a transvestite. Most of the action is appallingly brutal, and much of it is carried out either by Nazis or with the approval of Nazi officials, including the arrest and horrific punishment of one of their own caught with another man. The villains are monstrous but identifiably human--the policemen carrying out punishments, the SS, the soldiers, the citizens who turn upon anyone who is or appears to be different, or who simply has angered them for some reason. The major players are complex, especially the noble-spirited Friska, and Petya, whom you want to rescue and protect. Vienna Dolorosa has been denounced as pornographic, but pornography is intended to titillate and arouse; anybody who gets aroused by the events in Vienna Dolorosa has a serious problem. It's true there is an overwhelming amount of graphic sex and graphic violence of every description but each incident builds the story brick by horrifying brick. It is said that truth is in the eye of the beholder; the author puts faces on the faceless victims of violence and forces you to behold. There are no funny, fat, stupid Sgt. Schultzes among Dementiuk's Nazis, and no happy endings. The narration is ve

A gripping tale of forgotten life under a Hitler regime

Vienna Dolorosa, by Mykola Dementiuk takes place, March 12, 1938, the day Hitler invaded Austria. This book uses graphic examples to clarify the depths of terror that a Nazi Germany, under Hitler's rule, inflicted on not only Jewish people, but also other minorities of the era. Gays, Lesbians, Trans, women, and even some of Germany's own, who refused to bend to the dictator and his ways. No one went unscathed. Emotionally, physically, or psychologically, everyone felt the effects. Recruited and encouraged by higher Nazi officials, the book shows the sadistic mindsets of young, success and recognition-seeking soldiers in power-driven lusts of pillaging and plundering. Numerous atrocities are committed in 24-hours, including mutilation, castration, rape, brutality, murder, prostitution, and incest, however, not all perpetrated within Nazi ranks. Vienna Dolorosa's full cast of unsavory characters each hold a spot, center stage in the depiction of good and evil. From Brothel Redl proprietor Frau Friska Bielinska, the strong-willed, stronger-hearted, self-accepting transvestite to Gestapo officer Krumpf, who exhibited compassion and worldly wisdom with nondisclosure, each character, some to greater extremes than others, beheld a humble piece of all that is human. Yet, in the midst of page after page of twisting and revolting content, I found symbolism beautifully illustrated. As has been said, a thimble holds but an ounce of faith. Like a great relay where we hand the baton with hopes our successor will see the race through, caregivers exchanged this symbolic thimble from the story's beginning to the very end. While the theme brutally reminded me that no one is innocent, the story also highlighted a truth, that even society's vilest are capable of redemption, as long as enough humanity has been retained to recognize the sting of remorse. If you love historical fiction and can handle horrifying and gruesome depictions of the depravities during Hitler's Regime, you'll want to read this book. Although I was mortified with some of the scenes, I will read it again. If only to remind myself that I too, am only human. Vienna Dolorosa is must read! NotesVienna Dolorosa: Not for the faint of heart, includes rape, incest, intergenerational sex, prostitution, transvestism, teen sex, brutality, castration/mutilation, and murder.

A powerful read

A stunning and exemplary work of historical fiction, set in Vienna, Austria, taking place during a single day--March 12, 1938, the day Hitler "invades" Austria--in the Hotel Redl, a brothel where young boys dressed as girls entertain a discreet clientele. The hotel's proprietress, transvestite Friska Bielinska, watches the violence building on the streets of the city and tries valiantly to save guests and workers from the Nazi storm breaking around them. * * * Some books are easy to read. You snuggle up with them for a few hours of pleasure, a divertissement; perhaps a thrill or two from the plot, maybe a phrase here or there to savor. For most of us, this is mostly what we read. Other books are not so easy. They are the ones whose prose, whose authors, challenge us. They dwell on serious subjects, or sometimes, subjects that are difficult to face. They make us think. They make us face, within ourselves, the reality of the human condition; perhaps for better; more often, for worse. I personally find that certain themes, certain subjects, are difficult for me to read. That is not meant judgmentally. The good writer is, or should be, a student of human behavior. To wrinkle up one's nose at very much of it is to distance yourself from your rightful task. You cannot write about human beings if you do not understand them, and you cannot understand them if you cannot see them honestly. Still, I am inclined to avoid violence and there are certain types of sexual behavior--sadism, masochism, scatology among them--that turn me off on a personal level. Man's inhumanity to man depresses me. I do not generally read William Burroughs, as an example; he is just not to my tastes. But, this does not mitigate my opinion of him as a writer, a writer whom many consider to be brilliant. Vienna Dolorosa was, then, not an easy book for me to read, dealing as it does with this one day of violence. But, to review a book, as I see it, is to provide a potential reader, who may not at all share my own prejudices, with some intelligent basis upon which to make his decision, whether to read, or not to read. If I write reviews only of books that reflect my bias, I am producing only a certain kind of vanity writing, and avail the potential reader naught. I did not savor this book on a personal level. It troubled me greatly, in fact. It puts me, I fear, too closely in touch with my own inner brutality, which is to say, our common human thread of brutality, the seed of which exists in each of us, acknowledged or not. It can be painful to be forced to recognize it. Far easier to shy away from it. Like Burroughs, Mykola Dementiuk holds the mirror insistently before our faces, forces us to look into the darkest corners of our souls. He takes no blame if the image we see is not a rosy one. This is a book that reminds me, indeed, very much of Burroughs' work, and the writing is certainly brilliant. How could I not admire a writer who captures the reality of the Nazi brutal