The original village of
Gaienhofen was first mentioned in documents in 1295. The current municipality of Gaienhofen was formed on 01.10.1974
with the municipalities of Hemmenhofen, Horn and Gundholzen. The varied landscape with its reed banks, orchards and vegetable gardens on the protected southern flank and the colourful forests of the Schienerberg are largely under nature and landscape protection. The artists' village has always attracted and inspired famous poets and painters.
Hermann Hesse was one of the first to find a home in Gaienhofen between 1904 and 1912. His first house next to the Mauritius Chapel in the village is now part of the Gaienhofen Hesse Museum. His only self-built second home and family residence from 1907-1912 on a hill on the edge of the village is privately owned and is also open to the public on guided tours. The former castle of the Bishops of Constance is now home to the Ev. Ambrosius-Blarer-Gymnasium, right next to the Melanchthon Church.
Hemmenhofen, was a shoreline settlement in shallow water from the Neolithic period. The earliest document dates back to 882; it was owned by the Bishops of Constance and came to the Abbot of St. Gallen in an exchange of land. In Hemmenhofen park, a boulder commemorates the former Cistercian monastery with its ancestral seat in Feldbach, opposite in Switzerland, which owned Hemmenhofen until 1805. The right side altar of the late Gothic hall church of St Agatha from the 15th and 16th centuries comes from this convent.
The State Monuments Office carries out underwater and pile-dwelling archaeology in the former school.
The painter Otto Dix, who lived and worked here from 1936 until his death in 1969, has his final resting place here
in the cemetery above the village.
The farming and fishing village of Wangen was first mentioned in a document in 1155 and is now part of the municipality
Öhningen on the "Hintere Höri". The pile-dwelling settlements in Wangen-Hinterhorn have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011. Interesting finds from the Neolithic settlements can be seen here in the Fischerhaus Museum in Seeweg 1a , including original finds by Wangen citizen Kaspar Löhle, who was the first to discover the pile dwelling settlements in Germany in 1854. It is located in a listed 500-year-old timber-framed house, managed by the Förderverein Fischerhaus. An exhibition on the Jewish past in the town hall commemorates the Jewish poet Jacob Picard (*1883 in Wangen), who became a chronicler of German rural Jewry using the example of the village doctor Nathan Wolf. The Jewish cemetery is a valuable cultural asset in the community.
