page_title: 1918 Swiss general strike
section_title: Aftermath and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: 1918 Swiss general strike / Aftermath and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gedenktafel für die erschossenen Arbeiter während des Landesstreiks 1918
context_page_description: The 1918 Swiss general strike took place from November 12 to 14 and involved around 250,000 workers.
context_section_description: The 1918 general strike was the most significant domestic crisis in Switzerland since the Sonderbund War of 1847 and the formation of the Swiss federal state in 1848.
  In early 1919, twenty-one leaders were put on trial for incitement to mutiny. Grimm, Schneider, and Fritz Platten were convicted for their involvement in the publication and dissemination of the pamphlet calling for the general strike. Specifically, the proclamation contained a call for soldiers to ignore orders to shoot workers. They were sentenced to six months in prison. Nobs was convicted because of a different text he published which was found to be subversive. He was sentenced to a four-week prison term. All four served their sentences, while the other seventeen defendants were acquitted.
  The strike did not feature in many works of literary fiction. It plays a part in Meinrad Inglin's Schweizerspiegel, which was published in 1938. Les signes parmi nous, written by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz in 1919, tells the story of a Bible salesman who travels throughout Switzerland and is led to believe that the Apocalypse is coming because of the Spanish flu and the general strike. Jean-Paul Zimmermann's L'étranger dans la ville, written in 1919 but only published in 1931, deals with the way the strike was perceived in the town of Le Locle. In film, the strike was the subject of the 2018 docufiction Generalstreik 1918: Die Schweiz am Rande eines Bürgerkriegs, directed by Hansjürg Zumstein, which praises the sense of responsibility exhibited both by labor leaders and government officials to avoid a bloodshed.
caption: Commemorative plaque in Grenchen
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