Charles Beck

Charles Beck
From a portrait in the library of Harvard University.

Charles Beck or Karl Beck (August 19, 1798 – March 19, 1866) was a German-born American classical scholar, Harvard professor and friend of Charles Follen.

Beck was born in Heidelberg. His merchant father died when Beck was young, and his mother married Wilhelm de Wette, a theologian, biblical scholar, and professor in the University of Heidelberg. In 1810, the family moved to Berlin, where de Wette had been appointed professor of theology at the new Prussian university. In Berlin, while a student at the Werdersches Gymnasium, Beck began to frequent the Hasenheide Turnplatz where he became proficient in the arts of a Turner.

Beck studied the classics at the University of Berlin, then theology at the University of Heidelberg where he was ordained, and finally at the University of Tübingen where he was awarded a Ph.D.. While a student, he became active in the Burschenschaft movement, and on his graduation found his republican sentiments prevented him from pursuing a career in Germany. Thus he became employed for some time as tutor at the University of Basle in Switzerland, where his step father was a professor. After the murder of August von Kotzebue, de Wette had written a letter to the assassin's mother in which he attempted to console her saying her son did the act out of a mistaken sense of duty. On learning of the letter, the Prussian authorities accused him of excusing the assassination, dismissed him from his professorship at Berlin and banished him from Prussia. De Witte lived in retirement a few years, and then in 1822 had become professor of theology at the Basle university.