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MLA: Parshall, Ardis E. ""O, My Father": German." Keepapitchin.org, 13 May 2016, https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/05/13/o-my-father-german/.

APA: Parshall, A. (2016, May 13). "O, My Father": German. Keepapitchinin.org. https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/05/13/o-my-father-german/

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5 thoughts on ““O, My Father”: German”

  2. Very cool.

    I once sang this with five other missionaries for a funeral in a small Catholic church near Trier, Germany. The deceased was not a member of the church, but her son was our branch president, and had requested we sing it. And yes, we sang the verse about Mother in Heaven…

  3. This isn’t the tune we sing it to now, but it seems a lot more familiar than the Japanese one — I think I maybe saw this tune in the pre-1985 american hymnal.

  4. This is interesting. When i was a full-time German-language missionary, we were using an edition of the hymnal that did not have this song—and there was a mission joke that floated around occasionally (particularly in the context of “O My Father” being sung in an English-language ward or branch) that if it were ever translated into German, half the German church would leave, while the other half would sing it every Sunday.

    And now i find that it had previously been in the hymnal—and a quick check confirms that it’s made it back into the current German hymnal (under the title “O mein Vater”, and with the same tune as the current English hymnal).

    Looking at the lyrics, the only differences (aside from some unimportant bits of punctuation) between the older version and what’s in the current edition are some slight changes to verse 3, all of which are pretty minor. Here’s the current version, bolding the changes:

    Ob ich gleich dich Vater nannte,
    durch des Geistes heilgen Trieb,
    bis es du mir offenbartest,
    mir es ein Geheimnis blieb.
    Sind im Himmel Eltern einzeln?
    Die Vernunft weist solches fort,
    und sie sagt mit Kraft und Klarheit:
    „Du hast eine Mutter dort!”

    In order:

    1. du es to es du: Probably just to make it easier to sing clearly in unison, given the German language’s aversion to consecutive vowels—too many people probably threw a glottal stop in there (as i know i might well do).

    2. offenbaret to offenbartest: Basically, makes it less archaic; the current version is the usual written (though not spoken) past tense form of the verb (so, revealed).

    3. es mir to mir es: A meaningless change, but it makes it slightly more colloquial, but that’s marginal. I don’t have a solid conjecture on why this one happened at all, actually.

    4. Wahrheit to Klarheit: The most interesting one in my opinion, and the only one that really involves a meaning change of any sort, from truth to clarity. I actually prefer the sound of the older version on this one (voiced sounds are easier to sing, generally), but it’s not actually a big deal, and i guess whoever did the change liked alliteration.

    And that’s it—either way, reason tells me that i have a Mother there.

  5. I love this kind of comment, one that examines a document in a way that I’m not equipped to do. Thanks.

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