Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house.

There must be something on the air; a few foreign comics (including Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer winner Daniel Simonsen) were performing in English at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and now one of them, Germany's Michael Mittermeier, has brought his Fringe show, A German on Safari, to London for a short residency at Soho Theatre.

It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.

On the evidence of this Serpentine exhibition of huge sculptures, small sculptures, photographs, drawings, watercolours and prints, the German artist Thomas Schütte is obsessed, but obsessed, with faces. It is billed as the first show to focus entirely on his portraiture, of himself, his friends, and from the imagination. And the focus helps the visitor to grasp how playfully serious – or seriously playful – the artist is.  

Samuel Johnson’s description of opera as an exotic and irrational entertainment might well have been written after a performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor, give or take a hundred years or so. Of all great operas – and it is one – this must be one of the most colourful and most confused. Which is no doubt why it is very seldom staged, and why I thought it worthwhile to go to Hamburg to catch up with David Pountney’s new production at the Staatsoper in the city of Brahms, who was born in the same year as Borodin and never even tried to write an opera.

Unlike the heavy weather and hard lives of British folk songs, Central Europeans seem more concerned with imagination. Or maybe it's just that with their gypsy violins and heaving accordions everything sounds like it’s about Hänsel and Gretel forests. Southampton-based Anja McCloskey lived in Germany until she was 20, and it shows. Her debut, An Estimation, combines elements of The Mummers, The Tiger Lillies and Spiro with a hint of Berlin cabaret in the Thirties.

When we think of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, we do not think of US swimmer Mark Spitz’s record-breaking seven gold medals, or Finland’s Lasse Virén making his extraordinary comeback from a fall in the 10,000 metres to a record-breaking win. No, the 1972 Olympics will always be remembered for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes (and coaches) by Palestine’s Black September organisation. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich takes this act, portrayed in a gripping opening sequence, as its starting point.

Let us conclude, after London’s season of World Cities - 10 dance shows - that Pina Bausch was not a choreographer. She began 50 years ago in Essen as a ballet dancer and like so many dancers in that field got bored with the rules. When she took over ballet in Wuppertal in 1973, she clearly had rule-breaking in mind but also had something inside her head very different from what one might identify as the geometry of dance.

Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery.

You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."