ONE OF THE EARLIEST REFERENCES to montage as a literary device can be found in E. Kurt Fischer's 1929 review of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz:

Although recourse to “photomontage” also appears in contemporary reviews of Berlin Alexanderplatz, “montage” was the dominant term used to describe the stylistic peculiarities of the novel during this period and continues to be so. The concept of “literary montage,” in other words, arose through contemporary critics’ grappling with the novel long before the appearance of Theodor Adorno's and Peter Bürger's theories. In his 1930 review Walter Benjamin (1972b), for instance, offered a detailed articulation of the concept in terms of perceptual disruption and readymade material. Many other critics, including E. Kurt Fischer cited above, implied the same view in their own reviews. By at least 1935 and the publication of Ernst Bloch's The Heritage of Our Times, however, the narrow definition of montage as a formal technique common to theater, film, visual arts, and literature was replaced by a broad understanding of montage as a model for construing developments in the late capitalist society at large, including those in the sphere of entertainment, philosophy, and art. It is no wonder, therefore, that scholarship on Berlin Alexanderplatz, starting with Fritz Martini's (1954) postwar revival of interest in the novel, followed the same route.