“Watergate”, approx. 1973
“Watergate”, approx. 1973
Olschwanger’s satirical eye was by no means focused only on Germany. In this drawing, he comments on the political events surrounding U.S. President Richard Nixon and the so-called Watergate affair. In order to unlawfully obtain information about opponents in the U.S. elections, the Nixon administration had burglars break into the Watergate hotel, the location of the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the early 1970s. Watergate soon became a generic term for the Nixon administration’s extensive criminal activities, which were gradually uncovered and in 1974 forced the President to resign.
The scandal, along with Richard Nixon's futile attempts to extricate himself from the affair, became the subject of a cynical commentary by Olschwanger, who quoted a verse from Frank Wedekind’s poem “Albumblatt” (Album Leaf, 1905). Olschwanger’s contextualisation creates an additional play on words: the Americans commonly referred to Richard Nixon as Tricky Dick (or Tricky Dicky) because of his intrigues and unscrupulousness. It illustrates once again how Olschwanger often played with literary references and double entendres, both visually and in words.
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