A diverse experimental program for the study of the photoproduction of mesons off nuclei has been carried out -and is still running -at the Mainz MAMI and Bonn ELSA electron accelerators with the TAPS, Crystal Barrel, and Crystal Ball calorimeters. It is motivated as a detailed study of the in-medium properties of hadrons and the meson -nucleus interactions. Typical examples for the in-medium behavior of vector mesons (ω), scalar mesons (σ), and nucleon resonances (P 33 (1232), S 11 (1535), D 15 (1520)) are discussed. Special attention is paid to meson -nucleus final state interactions.