Carlos Alberto Haas was born in Guatemala and grew up in Germany. He studied musicology and history in Heidelberg, Rome and Munich. In 2018, he received his PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich with the thesis "Privacy in the Ghettos. Jewish Life in Poland under German Occupation 1939-1944." This thesis was awarded the Doctoral Prize of the Leibniz Association. He is currently a lecturer and researcher (Akademischer Rat a. Z.) in the Department of History at LMU Munich. His habilitation project "Who cares about Central America?" examines to what extent and with what consequences international attention was focused on the Central American region in the second half of the 20th century. He has been a Fellow at the University of Nottingham, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., among others.

Publications:

Books

2020. Das Private im Ghetto. Jüdisches Leben im deutschbesetzten Polen 1939 bis 1944, Göttingen 2020.

Journal articles and book chapters:

2021. El Movimiento Maya y la „Independencia“. Memoria histórica en un país dividido, in: Revista Política y Sociedad: p. 20-44.

2021. Familientrennung im Ghetto, In: Johannes Hürter, Wiebke Lisner, Cornelia Rauh, Lu Seegers (Eds.). Familientrennungen im nationalsozialistischen Krieg, Göttingen, p. 325-357.

2019. Transformations of the ‘Private’: Proximity and Distance in the Spatial Confinement of the Ghettos in Occupied Poland 1939-1942, In: Elizabeth Harvey, Johannes Hürter, Maiken Umbach, Andreas Wirsching (eds.): The Private in Nazi Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 331-352.

Research project as CALAS fellow (transatlantic tandem with Carlos Fredy Ochoa).

Title: Dialogues to revive the future, or how to "jump over my own shadow"? (original: Diálogos para revivir el futuro, o ¿cómo “saltar sobre mi propia sombra”?)

Abstract: The project examines through a historical and anthropological perspective how actors interact in Central America whose ideas of conflict resolution, their self-understanding and their visions of the world and the space in which they move are fundamentally different. On the one hand,it´s the cultural conceptions and political traditions that the Maya-K'iche' of Guatemala have about conflict, dialogue, agreement and mediation and the community and identity device that they generate. On the other hand, it is a Western-European concept in the broadest sense.  Three steps are followed:

1. Examine the two concepts of conflict resolution in so far as they played a role in Central American contexts. We then consider What broader traditions they can be integrated into? How exactly do the actors relate to the concepts and what practices they translate them into?

2. Ask what constructions of identity and notions of spatial order are associated with these conflict resolution strategies. What is the self-image of the respective actors?

3. Explore how these two concepts are related. To what extent was this encounter marked by asymmetries and inequalities of power, by coercion and structural or direct violence? Conversely, to what extent was it possible for the respective actors to question their attitudes and possibly relativize them?