Physics results from the first electron-proton collider HERA

After two years of experimenting at the new ep collider HERA many new results have been obtained. In this report we have presented results on interactions of high energy photons with matter, and showed that similar to hadronic interactions, hard scattering is observed in these collisions. The different photoproduction processes have been isolated, and a first attempt was made to measure the structure of the photon at HERA. A new region has been explored for deep inelastic scattering interactions. The proton structure is probed to very small values of Bjorken-x, showing a large increase of with decreasing x. Events with a large rapidity gap have been observed and are identified as diffractive scattering. The first electroweak results became available by studying the production of charged current events. Searches for new, exotic phenomena were made, but no evidence for the breakdown of the standard model has been found. (orig.)