Hans Dieter Beck

Hans Dieter Beck (9 April 1932 – 3 January 2025) was a German publisher. He was one of the two partners heading the C. H. Beck publishing group in the sixth generation, and responsible for the company's legal, tax, and economics publishing program.

Life and career Beck was born in Munich on 9 April 1932, From January 1961, he worked "as a kind of legal editor" in the family-owned publishing house C. H. Beck, He obtained his doctorate in law with a dissertation on licensing agreements in publishing at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München the same year. After four years of working in the publishing house and an extended stay in the United States, including at Harvard Business School and as a trainee in an American publishing house, From 1971, he headed the legal publishing branch. He led the publishing house together with his brother who was responsible for the fiction and non-fiction divisions; and a board member of the Association of Legal and Political Science Publishers. After the end of the Cold War, Beck also became involved in the former Eastern Bloc. He was very successful in Poland, but failed in Russia. The Russian management tried to expropriate the German parent company, and the Russian state demanded high fines for alleged irregularities in accounting. Although Beck won the court cases, he withdrew from business in Russia in 1999.

Personal life Beck was married; the couple had three daughters.

Awards In 1989, Beck was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1992 the medal, in 1993 the honorary award of the Schwabing Art Prize, in 2002 the honorary citizenship of the city of Nördlingen, and in 2012 the Bavarian Order of Merit.