Ghosts of Budapest

During the Covid-19 crisis, Chris Ceustermans was beset by an existential emptiness that prompted musings about his student days in Leuven in the late 1980s, when he often spent time in the company of a Hungarian called Yuri. A dissident journalist for Radio Free Europe, Yuri had fled Hungary and was staying in the Collegium Hungaricum, where in unexplained circumstances he resorted to suicide. Yuri was of the same generation as Viktor Orbán, in those days an important voice in the liberal resistance to communism. Thirty years later, Ceustermans decided to travel to Budapest in search of answers to his questions.

Here he talks with Yuri’s relatives, goes looking for the bride Yuri was destined never to marry and finds parallels – which he successfully places in alternating sections of the book – between the oppressive Leuven of the 1980s and today’s conservative regime in modern Budapest. His search does not always provide the answers he seeks, but it proves fascinating enough to continue pursuing. The closer the author comes to his friend’s death, the more that old authoritarian oppression seems to return.