Classical Polylogarithm -- Abstract of a series of lectures given at the workshop on polylogs in Essen, May 1 -- 4, 1997

These are extended abstracts from an series of lectures in 1997. The text has not been updated since then. We explain the construction of the motivic polylog as published in Annette Huber, J\"org Wildeshaus, Classical Motivic Polylogarithm According to Beilinson and Deligne, Doc.Math.J.DMV 3 (1998) 27-133. The main application is a comparison result for cyclotomic elements needed in the proof of the Tamagawa number conjecture of Bloch and Kato for Dirichlet characters. The exposition concentrates on the Hodge theoretic part of the story.