Exhibition of the week Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933

Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool (0151-702 7400, www.tate.org.uk). Until 15 October

“Interwar Germany is a historical moment that we all feel we know,” said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. The short-lived Weimar Republic (1919-33) has been the subject of endless documentaries and fictional treatments chronicling its “rampant inflation” and “decadent atmosphere”, not to mention the turbulent politics that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler. All of that may seem part of another age, yet the imagery of the period – as this new exhibition at Tate Liverpool devoted to two of Weimar Germany’s most distinctive artists powerfully demonstrates – is “still capable of delivering a sharp jab to the solar plexus”. The painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) and the photographer August Sander (1876-1964) could not be more different as artists but, seen together, their work delivers an uncanny “evocation of a time” that will “stop you in your tracks” and “stay with you for days”.

The exhibition opens with Sander, whose photographs tell the “story of a national mood growing rotten”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. The 140-plus images on show are taken from an encyclopaedic series of monochrome portrait photographs that Sander took between 1900 and 1950. They depict people from all walks of life, from farmers and workers to musicians and writers. The earlier ones, taken in the aftermath of the Great War, have an unexpected innocence to them. But later, as the Nazis take power, the “darkness seeps in”. In one “heartbreaking” sequence, we see portraits of “kids in homes, blind people, disabled people and tramps” that, the timeline informs us, were taken in the year Hitler ordered the killing of all Germans with “physical and mental disabilities”.

Dix, by contrast, depicts Weimar as a “nightmare of raddled prostitutes, drunk customers and violent sailors, of rape, murder and maggot-ridden skulls”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. A veteran of the First World War, Dix continued to see the “horrors” of the conflict in post-versailles Germany, and set himself to recording “man’s corrosive inhumanity”. He portrays urban life as a hive of “moral and spiritual corruption”; he even depicts his wife as a “sinister” figure. Perhaps the highlight of the show is a sequence of drawings and etchings of his wartime experience, in which he imagines “what it’s like to die beneath collapsing trenches, a storm of explosions or another man’s sodden corpse” – works of an “astonishingly urgent inventiveness”. This “is not so much one show as two superbly matched exhibitions in separate galleries”. And both are equally stunning.

Reuters editor-at-large Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times, picks five recent favourite books on history and current affairs. His latest book, Do I Make Myself Clear?, is published by Little, Brown at £20

Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson, 2017 (Scribe £25). Donald Trump has turned his back on Europe. Brexit implies Britain is on the same path. More uplifting is this history honouring Britain’s heroism in WWII. It’s a gripping story of how Britain nurtured defeated leaders and fighters from countries overrun by the Nazis.

Churchill & Orwell by Thomas E. Ricks, 2017 (Duckworth £25). They never met. Ricks’s brilliant insight is how much the apparent opposites spoke the same language, sharing a revulsion for enemies of freedom. Ricks’s twin biography makes us ask: where are the Orwells and Churchills of today?

How America Lost Its Secrets

by Edward Jay Epstein, 2017 (Knopf £22). Epstein holds us fascinated as he tracks computer geek Edward Snowden from the US to Moscow. The trail leads us to a house of mirrors. Is Snowden a hero for blowing the whistle on the surveillance programmes of the NSA? Or a traitor? Epstein credits Snowden for disclosures aimed at protecting personal privacy, but faults him, gravely, for revelations that can only help terrorists murder more people.

Climate of Hope by Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope, 2017 (St Martin’s Press £21). Trump quits the (now) 194 country agreement on climate

change. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Mayor Peduto of Pittsburgh says his city will follow the Paris targets, because his citizens applaud the cleaner air. Bewildered? Bloomberg and Pope expose the myths of the climate deniers.

Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell, 2017 (Random House £28). I knew Nixon. As editor at The Sunday Times during Watergate, I wrote unsparingly of his offences. So I was surprised to be asked to edit his last book. Farrell has written a definitive biography. There was a lot more to Nixon than lies and bombast, and this nuanced book shows that.