AK: On the one hand you have a tractor as an invention, a caterpillar tread and machinery for hauling, it can travel cross-country and level out ditches and it can do things with the earth in a specific fashion, and secondly, you have a firing platform, an artillery emplacement that can move around, and thirdly a tank. If you take the components of a tank, what interests you there?

HM: Why I'm so fascinated by that is a question I ask myself. Why am I fascinated by the word armour, armour-plating?

AK: And also the workers that make it.

HM: It must have something to do with a need for armour, a subjective need for armour-plating. That's also why it's a dream image, the tank.

AK: The dream image is getting heavier. The first tanks are light.

HM: The other important factor is speed, though these days it's no longer that, of course. But in World War II it was still an image of speed.

AK: Sixty, eighty kilometres an hour they could travel.

HM: I myself didn't actually have anything to do with them directly. I did military training, but the war was nearing its end and we only once had contact with the enemy. That was with Soviet tanks. Actually it started when we were already on the way into American activity. Our officers, understandably, preferred to be captured by the Americans rather than the Russians, so we were marching from Wismar in the direction of Schwerin. We had anti-tank grenade launchers and relatively old rifles, they were Norwegian front-loaders.

AK: Could you fire an anti-tank grenade?

HM: I was taught to do that, yes.

AK: What is an anti-tank grenade-launcher?

HM: If only I knew now. I've repressed it so much, that's the strange thing. I was given the complete ‘werewolf’ training, and we practised with anti-tank grenade launchers. They were relatively easy to handle, but I can't describe it for you.

AK: Did you fire them?

HM: Only practice shots.

[…]

AK: What does a tank mean? Speed? A racing car is speedy.

HM: There are perhaps three things: speed, protection and imprisonment. You probably know what the soldiers say about tanks. From the beginning they were human canned food in there, always with the prospect of being fried. There were three things: speed, protection, but at the same time imprisonment.