The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?

As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of the depravity of the camps, it is important that the warning from history is regularly proclaimed anew – and heeded.

This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic reflection on Putin’s war on Ukraine?

The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was more important than artistic form. The 20th-century Russian-Ukrainian writer A. Anatoli, who renounced his Soviet identity (and surname Kuznetsov) after defecting to England in 1969, was unquestionably an artist.

We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.

We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.

Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America and the book’s subject is the permanent holiday of the so-called “Angel of Death” – a poisoned chalice of a life in unending, hidden exile.

The exhibitions of the German artist Anselm Kiefer have always been spectacular: large works with a numinous presence, often breath-taking and always mysterious. His new installation in Paris’s Grand Palais Ephémère, the temporary structure at the end of the Champ de Mars which stretches south from the Eiffel Tower, is perhaps the most ambitious work he has ever presented in a museum space.

This is simultaneously a love story and an archaeology of hate, a sparky, spiky encounter between two individuals whose chemistry proves as destructive as it is explosive.