These notes are based on the lectures I delivered at the German Mathematical Society Seminar in Schloss Michkeln in DUsseldorf in June. 1986 on Hermitian-Einstein metrics for stable bundles and Kahler-Einstein metrics. The purpose of these notes is to present to the reader the state-of-the-art results in the simplest and the most comprehensible form using (at least from my own subjective viewpoint) the most natural approach. The presentation in these notes is reasonably self-contained and prerequisi tes are kept to a minimum. Most steps in the estimates are reduced as much as possible to the...