This essay uncovers the early revival of John Heartfield’s radical montage technique in the late 1950s and the impact his radical montages from the 1930s had on the documentary practices of the Hungarian conceptual artists László Lakner and Miklós Erdély, as well as the East German conceptual artist Klaus Staeck. These three artists transformed Heartfield’s technique as they responded to the Vietnam war. They pushed Heartfield’s technique toward more complex modalities of the composite image, in the forms of ‘historical pop painting’ (a realist technique), ‘creative thinking’ (a political and meta-photographic analysis of humanity), and an ‘intermedia’ method. These politically oriented artists, together with an anti-war student movement, developed a diverse and networked culture of dissent in the 1960s and beyond.