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You know the print: swoops of Prussian blue water topped with white foam curling like fingers above the abyss, Mount Fuji in the back.

A meeting was arranged with her and Hermann Parzinger, president of The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, a body that oversees 19 museums and collections including the Humboldt Forum.

Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, noted that the background is particularly complex in the case of the Kogi masks.

Edeltraut would be her son’s most important collaborator — inverting that word’s negative wartime charge — with heroic investigative feats like translating from childhood memory an archaic, loopy Prussian script, through the cloud of glaucoma.

Claire Messud, a novelist, is also the author of a book of essays, “Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write.”