This volume contains a selection from the papers presented at the Fifth European Multigrid Conference, held in Stuttgart, October 1-4, 1996. There were 88 registered participants from 14 different countries worldwide, and 65 lectures were given. Earlier European Multigrid Conferences were held in Cologne in 1981 and 1985, in Bonn in 1990, and in Amsterdam in 1993. The next European Conference is planned in 1999 in Gent. The European Multigrid Conference '96 was organized by the Institut fUr Computer- anwendungen (ICA) of Stuttgart University, in cooperation with the GAMM Com- mittee for "Scientific Computing", SFB 359 and 404 and the research network WiR Ba- Wii. The list of topics contained lectures on Multigrid Methods: robustness, adaptivity, wavelets, parallelization, application in computational fluid dynamics, porous media flow, optimisation and computational mechanics. A considerable part of the talks fo- cused on algebraic multigrid methods. The remaining contributions will be published by the Institut fUr Computeranwen- dungen (ICA) in Stuttgart in a special ICA report. Special thanks are due to Oktavia Klassen, who carefully compiled the contributions to this volume.