The idea that the growing demand for energy worldwide can be met with energy from nuclear power is nonsense.

I hope Gunter Grass will continue helping the SPD in campaigns and that he will otherwise remain with us as a provocative literary figure, as well.

It isn't easy for everyone in Germany to make ends meet through well-paid work in Germany. You have to have sufficient skills and work hard. And I also know that we have much too much poverty and inequality here. Still, our parents and grandparents built an incredibly prosperous and peaceful country. One shouldn't, of course, play down the degree to which this is dependent on our economic strength. The truth is that Moscow, Beijing and Washington have one thing in common: They don't value the European Union at all. They disregard it.

But, as environment minister, I am very interested in a thriving German automobile industry, because I can only pay for the rising costs of environmental protection at home and abroad if there are people in Germany with jobs and who pay taxes.

My office has a view of low-cost housing, old East German prefabricated apartment buildings. It isn't an attractive view, but it's very helpful, because it reminds me to ask myself, whenever there is a decision to be made, whether the people who live there can afford our decisions.

Those who reject integration programs in the long term have as little right to stay in Germany as a hate preacher paid from abroad in a mosque.

In the business of politics, emotions and productive dissatisfaction with the world in which we live today are gradually being covered up by the minutiae of ordinary life.