Despite the high epidemiological relevance of depressive disorders in daily clinical practice, they are insufficiently diagnosed. For screening, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force proposed two questions aiming at finding depressive core symptoms: "Over the past two weeks, have you felt down, depressed, or helpless?" and "Over the past two weeks, have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things?". We tested comparable questions in a representative sample from the German population. The correlations between the screening and validated questionnaires for depression point towards the validity of the screener. Relevant indices are satisfying: For major depression the sensitivity is 72.6% and specificity is 87.4%.