TY - JOUR AU - Frenschkowsky, Marco PY - 2015/08/25 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology: An annotated bibliographical survey of primary and selected secondary literature JF - Marburg Journal of Religion JA - MJR VL - 4 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.17192/mjr.1999.4.3760 UR - https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/3760 SP - AB - No New Religious Movement has been a subject of more public interest and of more heated discussions in Germany during the last two decades than Scientology. I first became interested in this debate in the early Eighties, but only in 1996/1997 - after completing a similar project about Theosophy and Helena Blavatsky - I seriously started to search for available material on Hubbard and the movement he founded. Only then I became aware of the rather paradoxical situation in Germany, that there exists a large New Religious Movement (whose status as a religion nevertheless is doubted by some) which is being discussed on German TV almost every week, which forms a topic of forensic debate in many legal proceedings, and which is the one movement treated most extensively in the official report on New Religious Movements published by the German parliament (Endbericht der Enquete-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestages "Sogenannte Sekten und Psychogruppen", 1998) - but nevertheless has almost never been treated on an academic level of research. ER -