Dangerous Memory in Johann Baptist Metz’s Political Theology

This chapter will introduce and discuss Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of dangerous memory. The first parts of the chapter offer an overview of important steps in the development of Metz’s thought. Section 2.3 and the ones that follow focus on the concept of dangerous memory, whose introduction in 1969 marks the beginning of Metz’s mature political theology. Since Metz elaborated the concept of dangerous memory only in a programmatic form, the following reconstruction will be concerned with developing the relations between dangerous memory and the three main categories of Metz’s theology—the subject, practice, and time—in a more systematic manner. The summary and critical remarks in Sect. 2.5 capture the most important issues and point to possible problems that might arise, among other aspects, when using Metz’s approach to analyze the memory of Marielle Franco.