He was a patriarch, he was a lovable guy and an opinionated man, he was the largest legal publisher in Europe. He was a meticulous and obsessive worker; he was rich but a frugal person; the cars he drove were always smaller than those of his managers. He didn’t like showing off and showing off. And when he was in his nineties, he still cycled to the office every day when he could, most recently on December 23rd. And he was a gifted, highly inventive digital senior. The Munich publisher Hans Dieter Beck died in Munich on January 3rd at the age of 92.
He was, as he described himself, “one of a kind”. Managing a major publishing house at his age was something that had never happened before. Until almost the end he was a marvel of physical and mental fitness, a Class 4 mountaineer; This requires sure-footedness and a head for heights. Since an accident thirty years ago, he has only been able to walk uphill and no longer downhill; So he chose his tours based on whether there was a cable car down. Only uphill: This could be understood symbolically; it also applied and applies to his publisher CH Beck.
He was already seventy when he entered the digital business. Today, a good twenty years later, it accounts for sixty percent of the publishing house’s sales, which total well over 500 million euros. That was and is his achievement: he inherited the analogue world of law books and created their digitality. His database “Beck online” is present in every law firm and every university library. He commercialized and digitized the legal book and magazine business with great ingenuity; When other publishers were still laboriously sowing, he was already reaping. And most recently, when other publishers didn’t even know what AI was, he used it and sold it together with his legal works as Beck-Chat.
The father was a publisher and party comrade and was almost dispossessed after the war
Compared to a modern publishing manager, Hans-Dieter Beck’s old-fashioned manner might seem a little eccentric. But he was successful and was able to allow himself to gossip about other publishers and media dealers who had become “dependent on the chatter of their committees” and “megalomaniacal” and then plunged into “adventures”. He gave such people the flirtatious, modest advice: “Publishers, stick to your guns!” True to this motto, Beck, for example, bought the smaller competition, Nomos-Verlag, which has a fine and wide range of products with relatively low print runs.
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In 1933, his father bought the flourishing publishing house of the Jewish publisher Otto Liebmann for 250,000 Reichsmarks. Liebmann had been the editor of the German Juristenzeitung since 1896 and was the founder of the “Brief Comments” series, which was then continued with great success by the publishing house CHBeck as “Beck’sche Kurz Comments”. According to Hans Dieter Beck, the purchase of the Jewish publishing house was made “under honorable conditions,” and Liebmann said afterwards that “my father was a man of honor.” The Nazi editors law was then quickly passed – “then Liebmann would no longer have been allowed to continue his legal magazine.” The publisher Liebmann saw all this coming and also approached other publishers, but they rejected it or found the price too expensive. “And then my father got there.”
After the war, the Americans almost expropriated my father’s publishing house “because my father was a party comrade – even though he was not a Nazi. He also edited many Jewish authors.” But it took quite a long time after the war until Beck said goodbye to the Nazi namesakes for his major commentaries and collections of laws. The “Palandt”, the commentary on the BGB, named after the Nazi President of the Reich Justice Examination Office, and the “Schönfelder”, also named after a Nazi lawyer, were only renamed in 2021, as were other works. Beck had held on to the Nazi-tainted names for a long time, not only because they were established as a “brand,” but also, as he said, to let readers “stumble” over the history. Only after a lot of criticism and to “rule out any misunderstandings” did Beck finally give in.
Sometimes CH Beck’s legal texts correct the sloppiness of the official legislature
The symbol of the CHBeck publishing house, founded in 1763 and family-owned since then, with its headquarters in Munich’s university district, on Schwabinger Wilhelmstrasse, is a griffin – and that is significant. You can’t turn a paragraph without finding the winged animal that holds a capital “B” like Beck in its paw: the sign of the publishing house that has the legal world under control: Without Beck, no student can study law, no public prosecutor accuse, no judge judge and no lawyer work. The path to the legal profession is paved with Beck, and so are the paths in the legal profession.
In Germany, Beck is not only a legal publisher, but also a bit of a legislator. The Regensburg law professor Dieter Schwab (his textbook on family law is published by CH Beck with 594 pages in its 32nd edition) once showed in a gloss how the sloppiness of the official legislature is carefully corrected in legal texts by CH Beck, if and because who so often loses track in a hurry and then produces references to incorrect paragraphs. That’s how Beck was, that’s how he is: care with business acumen.
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He quickly corrected his mistake of wanting to make money in Russia. In 1996 he proudly presented a ten-centimeter-thick document, a Russian legal collection; At that time he was on the Russian market with sixty legal titles. When his Russian managers tried to expropriate him, he said, “I went to the police.” A nice police officer then said to him: “Mr. Beck, this is currently the fashion here, you are not the only one who is being expropriated. We at the police are not in favor of it at all. But we have so much to do because a few people are getting shot. We’re prosecuting capital crimes here, so unfortunately I don’t have time to deal with your strange desires.”
Shortly afterwards, according to Beck, the state approached him with mafia-like demands; He wanted additional tax payments from him amounting to three years’ sales. Although he sued successfully, he came to the realization that “law doesn’t play a big role in Russia.” Beck was more successful elsewhere in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland. He is big in the legal business there.
Beck did not see himself as an expander, but as a “gardener of jurisprudence.”
Major publisher, expander: Hans Dieter Beck didn’t like to hear such attributes. He preferred to be called the “Gardener of Law.” The garden in which he worked was very large, it is a huge legal forest with attached nurseries: bookstores, printing houses and partner publishers. When he celebrated his ninetieth birthday, he was asked what one had to do in order to still be as fit as he was in old age. “Mountaineering, cycling, always going to the doctor on time,” he had answered. “But above all, I would advise everyone never to retire.” So never stop working? was the question. “Exactly,” he said: “And if you give up your current job, then you have to do something else; or work for free.”
After a few detours at the beginning, he never gave up his job as a publisher. After studying law with Eugen Ulmer, the father of copyright law, he received his doctorate on “Licensing Agreements in Publishing”, then began working in the publishing house’s legal editing department, went to the judiciary for a few years, and in 1967 became a court assessor for civil matters at the regional court Munich I, was at the public prosecutor’s office for a “disgusting” year, then became a district judge.
With these experiences, I started making books again in 1970. Father Heinrich appointed his two sons Hans Dieter and Wolfgang as co-partners. Hans Dieter, nine years older than Wolfgang, took over the legal publishing house, Wolfgang devoted himself to the fiction and humanities sections – and passed them on to his son Jonathan in 2015. Hans Dieter Beck, of course, did not give up the business in the legal, tax and economics division until his death.
He never gave a thought to slowing down. And because it was supposed to stay that way for a long time, he liked climbing the Wallberg on Lake Tegernsee. If you saw an older gentleman there with headphones on, then it was probably Beck listening. When he once, a good two decades ago, talked to a small group about his listening wanderlust, Arthur Schnitzler’s “Casanova’s Journey Home” was on his program; This is a novella about the splendor and misery of an aging connoisseur who has been passed over by life. Beck probably liked it so much because, unlike Schnitzler’s protagonists, he felt like he was in the middle of life as an older man but still a young father.
At 55, he had married his 25-year-old wife, who then took care of raising the couple’s three girls – so that, as he put it, “he could concentrate very much on the publishing house”. Was he macho? “You can’t call it that,” he said on his ninetieth birthday: “But I was and am the much older husband, more than twice as old.” If the Buddenbrooks could be written again and this family saga wasn’t in the Hanseatic language North, but in the south of Bavaria: the creative Hans Dieter Beck would be the main character. He has shaped the publishing house so much that it’s hard to imagine what will happen without him.