Overview on the Physics Program at ELSA / Bonn

One of the foremost challenges in hadron physics is to obtain an understanding of the effective degrees of freedom which lead to the formation of mesons and baryons and govern their inner structure. The ELSA facility of the university of Bonn provides essential tools to investigate the baryon mass spectrum up to high excitations through the systematic study of single and multiple meson production. This comprises a 3.5 GeV electron accelerator, highly polarized nucleon targets and a 4π spectrometer for charged and neutral particle detection. In this contribution an overview on the instrumentation and the program is given