[1] Wittgenstein taught philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1929, but a decade earlier had trained as a school teacher in Austria.

Ten years later, while working at Cambridge, he returned to the village, to a mixed reception, to ask for the children's forgiveness.

[5] In August 1918 Wittgenstein completed his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921 in Germany, and widely regarded as one of the most important works of 20th-century philosophy.

He did not have a high opinion of the villagers, writing to Bertrand Russell in October 1921: I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness.

[7]After renting a room in the attic of the local grocer's store, Wittgenstein was soon the object of gossip among the villagers, who regarded him with suspicion.

He taught them about architecture, botany, geology, bought a microscope for them, made model steam engines, showed them how to dissect a squirrel, and how to boil the flesh off a cat then reassemble its skeleton.

[8] Hermine Wittgenstein, his older sister, watched him teach, and said the pupils literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations.

[9]He spent hours with favoured pupils, offering them extra tuition outside the classroom, sometimes until eight in the evening, which did not endear him to their parents.

[10] Wittgenstein was reportedly seen as a tyrant by the slower students, boxing their ears (Ohrfeigen) as well as pulling hair (Haareziehen).

He devoted the first two hours of each school day to mathematics, which some of the students recalled years later with horror, according to Monk.

[12] One villager described him as "that totally insane fellow who wanted to introduce advanced mathematics to our elementary school children.

The story of how Wittgenstein had given a boy a bloody nose spread, and soon other children were playing similar tricks, which included pretending to faint.

[7] A student from Cambridge, Frank P. Ramsey, arrived in Austria to visit him in September 1923 to discuss a review of the Tractatus he had agreed to write for Mind.

[13]While in Cambridge, Ramsey told the economist John Maynard Keynes that Wittgenstein was refusing all financial help from his family, and was even returning Christmas presents they sent him, because he did not want to have any money he had not earned himself.

During a lesson in April 1926 Wittgenstein hit Haidbauer two or three times on the head, and the boy supposedly collapsed unconscious.

Ten years later Wittgenstein was living in Norway, and went through a period of wanting to make confessions to his friends about various issues, one of which was his use of violence against the children in Austria.

[5]Another friend, Rowland Hutt, remembered the confession differently, and said it concerned having lied about the Haidbauer incident during the court case.

In the same year that he made this confession to friends, he also travelled to Otterthal and appeared without warning at the homes of the children he had hurt.

Wittgenstein stayed for about half an hour and mentioned that he also wanted to go to Gansterer and Goldberg to beg their pardon in a similar way.