Hard exclusive reactions and generalized parton distributions at HERMES

The concept of generalized parton distributions is discussed and applied to hard exclusive reactions at the HERMES experiment at DESY. Recent results on hard exclusive meson production and in particular on deeply virtual Compton scattering are presented. For the first time, information about the orbital angular momentum of quarks in the nucleon can be extracted from experiment. Using a new detector for recoil particles, HERMES will be able to give even more complete results in future.