THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I have sought to demonstrate the strengths of a narrow definition of montage built solely on perceptual, stylistic, and narratological criteria. I have posited only one subset of a broadly conceived hyperstimulation—the perceptual experience of disruption—as the essential intermedial trait of montage, and then proceeded to tease out its specificities in different media. I have found that the stylistic distinctiveness defines ready-mades and, by extension, montage in pictorial art and literature alike. In the case of film, I have articulated both visual and sound montage in terms of spatiotemporal dislocation diverging from editing norms. In other words, by bracketing off the question of the meaning of the work I have steered clear from interpretative commitments and yet have succeeded in identifying and explaining the device's variations across different art forms.

Using Berlin Alexanderplatz and its adaptations as case studies, I have also endeavored to shine new light on these works as well as to illuminate their interrelationships. I argued, for instance, that film montages in both Jutzi's and Fassbinder's film version owed little to the corresponding passages in the novel. I also found that montage played a key role in simulating narratological conditions of one medium in another. Whereas in Döblin literary montage eliminated the controlling fictional narrator and by doing so emulated the narratological properties typical of fiction film, Fassbinder achieved the presence of narratorial control that is standard in literary fiction through voice-over montage. As such, Berlin Alexanderplatz and its adaptations have not served simply as a testing ground for the narrow definition of montage, but rather became a privileged site that allowed me to relate montage to even larger intermedial stakes, including the relationship of adaptations to its source and the status of narrative voice in different media. In fact these works have not only dictated what the book is about but have even defined its mode of inquiry.

Most important, it was the novel and its pivotal place in the nascent discourse on montage of the late 1920s that gave rise both to the narrow definition of montage and the method behind this book—formal analysis guided by the analysis of contemporary reviews. Through their engagement with the novel, contemporary reviewers drew parallels between literature, film, and pictorial art to articulate a precise definition of montage that had all of the advantages of intermediality without any of its drawbacks.