Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield

Because Münzenberg's publishing infrastructure lay outside Germany before 1933, he could, once in exile, rescue part of his publishing apparatus as well as build on those outlets.8 The effectiveness of this transnational network also relied unintentionally on the various publishers and illustrated magazines that imitated the AIZ or reproduced Heartfield's montages in the early 1930s in the name of pro-Soviet sympathy and antifascist solidarity.9 These international professional relations define a network of production and dissemination made possible through improved forms of technology, which under the conditions of exile proved unsustainable in the long term. [...] the lAH's primary purpose was the preparation, politically and propagandistically, for the German and central European revolution.10 Münzenberg turned to Malik-Verlag, run by Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde, to promote aid for the famine-stricken workers, because the communist press was reluctant to help.