picture info
Picture on the left: Hohe Strasse around 1928, with house number 133 to the left of the ‘Elogius Bad’ on the right-hand side of the picture. A few years after the photo was taken, the Neubner bookshop was located here on the ground floor and the ‘Vega’ above it on the first floor. © Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, rba_102529
Picture on the right: © Joshua Esters / LVR-Zentrum für Medien und Bildung
The Vega in Hohe Strasse
Hohe Straße 133, 50667 Köln
Vega opened as a vegetarian restaurant on the first floor of Hohe Strasse 133, near the cathedral, in 1933. It did more, however, than serve vegetarian dishes: its proprietors, Jenny and Walter Fließ, were members of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK, International Socialist Militant League), a small left-wing resistance group. The restaurant served as meeting place and source of funding. It also offered work to unemployed comrades.
League members had to subordinate their personal lives to political work, transferring all income over 150 Reichsmark to the League and abstaining wholly from meat and alcohol.