“Ugly, Small and Dirty Was the Slovenian Journalism Before the War”

Views of Ivan Štefe and Miroslav Malovrh on their deaths in 1919 and 1922

Abstract

In the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy, the ideological and political situation in Carniola was co-created, among others, by two prominent promoters of the cultural struggle at that time – the editors of the leading political newspapers, the liberal Slovenski narod and the Catholic Slovenec, Miroslav Malovrh (1861-1922) and Ivan Štefe (1875-1919). Their death was another Slovenian farewell to the Austrian era. The share of the two editors in the cultural struggle that it had initiated, first as a “Kranj quarrel” and then as a broader feature of political life in Slovenia, was more or less obviously pointed out at the time of their deaths. Their qualities as journalists and others were also highlighted, but the resentments on both sides of the »clerical«-liberal duo remained. Their newsletters did not devote a special note to the two opposing editors. But politics went on, even on the tracks laid by Malovrh and Štefe.