The real Room 101

H Orwellgeorge aving made a reference to "Room 101" in Orwell’s 1984, I went to find an explanatory link. (On some
level or other, the very existence of hypertext is one of my biggest motivations for blogging. Even though most of y’all may not — and probably don’t — follow the links, just finding them and setting them up releases endorphins in my brain. I dig making the connections; my favorite literary device is allusion.)

In this case, I was more than usually rewarded.

Like Winston Smith, you probably know already what Room 101 is. As O’Brien explains it to the prisoner,

You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the
answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the
worst thing in the world…
The worst thing in the world… varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.

In my case, it was having blood drawn, which is why it took me almost 49 years to work up the nerve to start making donations at the Red Cross.

But the really cool thing, the point of this post, is to share with you what I learned by reading the Wikipedia link:

Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he used to sit through tedious meetings.

Boy, can I identify with that! I certainly hope Wikipedia was right on that one, because it really brings Orwell down to where I can relate.

Here’s a creepier fact I ran across, about the days when the Stasi terrorized East Germany:

The people of the GDR lived through their own private Nineteen Eighty-Four every single day. Funder describes Orwell’s book as "like a manual for the GDR, right down to the most incredible detail". The party, if not the proles, knew that very well. She remembers that the much-dreaded Stasi chief Erich Mielke even managed to renumber the offices in the secret-service headquarters. "His office was on the second floor, so all the office numbers started with ‘2’. Orwell was banned in the GDR, but he would have had access to it. Because he so wanted the room number to be 101, he had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, and so his office was Room 101."