Austria Centre Leiden hosts Seventh Annual Lecture featuring Professor Jakub Beneš
On Wednesday April 8, 2026, the Austria Centre Leiden and the Special Chair for Central European Studies hosted the Seventh Annual Lecture in Austrian Studies.
Violinist Barbara Ernder welcomed guests with Central European music and the event space was enlivened by a pop-up exhibit from our friends at The Austrian Embassy to The Netherlands. His Excellency, Ambassador Bert Theuermann and his cultural attache Rowie-Anne Bovendeerd arranged for a mini-exhibition celebrating thirty years of Austrian membership in the European Union. On the occasion, the Ambassador and his team asked us to remember 'how important this accession was in terms of the economy and society. It opened up Austria, and even REMAINS more important today with all the geopolitical changes and economic challenges' that Austria faces.
Associate Professor Jakub Beneš (University College London) gave the Annual Lecture entitled 'East Europe’s Forgotten Peasant Revolution: The Era of World Wars Reconsidered'.
Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey introduced the speaker with the following words:
Who are the people and why do their stories matter? I think about this collective word “the people” quite often. When I listen to modern politicians discuss what “the people” want and when I gaze back upon the past and think about the truthfulness of the histories we study and write. Who, in fact, are “the people”? Some of you remember the protests in East Germany in the Fall of 1989 when millions of east Germans came out into the street holding signs which said “WIR SIND DAS VOLK.” This was an explicit message to the socialist government who purported to speak for “the people.” Central and Eastern Europe, in fact, is a fruitful laboratory to think about the “people”, whether we reference the democratic reforms that enlarged electorates across the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the long 19th century or dive deep into the words of Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik, Jan Potocka or Vaclav Havel which inspired everyday dissent amongst “the people” by inspiring them to “live in truth” or “Žít v pravdě” during the 1970s and the 1980s. Hannah Arendt, born in Konigsburg, had her own ideas about the people, she talked about the “masses” and she talked about the “mob” and that distinction proved vital for her work on totalitarian regimes. Yes, the people is not always a positive collective noun. That nuance adds to it’s complexity and it’s importance for those of us who want to make sense of the present as well as the past. We might add more complexity: do the people include women? Do the people include children? Is the people equivalent to the nation? A socio-ecomonic class? An educational level? And then, there’s the realm of music, literature and poetry. When I think about the words “the people” I think of Marta Kubisova:
Ať mír dál zůstává s touto krajinou
Zloba, závist, zášť, strach a svár
Ty ať pominou, ať už pominou
Teď, když tvá ztracená vláda věcí tvých
Zpět se k tobě navrátí, lide navrátí
May peace remain with this land
May malice, envy, hatred, fear and strife Pass away—
may they pass away
Now that the self rule that you had lost
Will return to you, the people will return.
Our guest knows quite a bit about the matters of song, poetry, popular fiction, “folk systems” and, I would say, “the people” because he has spent the last twenty years in their company. His historical tellings, riven with bittersweet humor, real-life honesty and the existence of so many who are often consigned to E.P. Thompson’s “dustbin of history” are where I go to find the people and why they matter. We, of course, sitting here, are both vastly insignificant and hugely significant. we are the greengrocers who Vaclav Havel critiqued. And our lives, as well as the lives of workers and peasants and the under-represented form the bedrock of Jakub’s unique contribution. Associate Professor at the University College London, Dr. Jakub Beneš is a historian of central and eastern europe, particularly of the territories that made up the Habsburg Monarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He trained at Middlebury College in Vermont and at the University of California, Davis for his doctorate under the supervision of Prof. William Hagen. His heritage and the family he has created is embedded in the people he studies: his parents are Czech and Slovak, his wife is Slovenian and I am quite envious of his two sons (one born only last month) who are living multi-lingual central european lives in the great central and east european city of London. I didn’t mention his connections to greater Austria but I should note that Jakub speaks beautiful German alongside the many other languages he uses for his research and his beer toasts. We have had many pints together as graduate students connected to the kroužek student group at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. He is at once my peer and a scholar who I deeply admire and strive to be like.
His first book, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017) examined the culture of the workers’ movement in Prague, Vienna, Brno and elsewhere and how it evolved in a more nationalist direction alongside electoral democratization and war. It was awarded the 2017 Barbara Jelavich Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the 2016 George Blazyca Prize (awarded 2018) by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, and the 2021 Victor Adler State Prize advancement award (Förderungspreis) by the Republic of Austria's Ministry for Education, Science and Research. The book forms part of Beneš's broader interest in the history of socialism, which has led to a number of other projects, including a co-edited interdisciplinary volume called Socialist Imaginations and a chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy.
His second book, The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025) aims to rethink the era of world wars in east central Europe from the perspective of the countryside, emphasising the critical, though neglected role of peasants in war, politics, and culture. Part of the research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of a multinational project that Dr Beneš directed from February 2021 to September 2023 with partners in Slovenia, Hungary, and elsewhere. Related to the book are several articles he wrote on a loose movement of rural Austro-Hungarian army deserters and radical peasants called ‘Green Cadres’ that existed across the region, but possessed no conventional political representation. These have appeared in Past & Present (winner of the 2018 Stanley Z. Pech Prize of the Czechoslovak Studies Association), Contemporary European History, and Slavic Review.
Let us welcome Prof. Beneš to Leiden!