Fermion-pair Production above the Z and Search for New Phenomena

A review of the measurements of hadron, flavour-tagged and lepton-pair production cross-sections and lepton-pair forward-backward asymmetries performed by the four LEP experiments ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL at energies between 130 and 183 GeV is given. All 183 GeV results are preliminary. The searches by the four collaborations for new physics phenomena like contact interactions and compositeness, exchange of R-parity violating sneutrinos or squarks, leptoquarks or additional heavy gauge bosons Z' are summarized. No evidence for deviations from the Standard Model expectations is found and new or improved limits are derived.