Langenstein Castle

The oldest work at Langenstein belongs to the abbey of Reichenau, which around 1100 raised a bergfried on a long spine of Jurassic limestone in the Hegau, south of Eigeltingen and between Stockach and Singen. That tower survives as the lower storey of the present building. Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the site was held by ministerials of Reichenau who took the castle's name as their own.

The line of von Langenstein died out at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Over the centuries that followed the castle passed through the hands of a long succession of nobles, among them the knight Bilgeri von Heudorf.

In 1568 Hans Werner von Raitenau bought Langenstein and its attached estates from Hans Wilhelm von Knöringen. The main range of the schloss went up largely between 1570 and 1605, built around a square tower, and was later enlarged by the so-called New Schloss and tied to it by a linking wing; a chapel, the Ludwigshof and the Reichenau tithe cellar complete the group.

Guidobald Graf von Welsperg inherited Langenstein in 1677, and the estate stayed with his family until 1826, when Karl Graf von Welsperg, overwhelmed by debt, sold it to Grand Duke Ludwig of Baden as the grand duke's private property.

The grand duke died in 1830 and Langenstein went to his son Ludwig Wilhelm August, Count of Langenstein und Gondelsheim (1820-1872), together with the other holdings his father had bought privately in the Hegau, the Linzgau, the Danube valley and the Kraichgau and gathered into the comital Langenstein family estate. The count stood outside the grand-ducal succession: his mother, Katharina Werner, an extra at the Karlsruhe court theatre, was not of equal birth, and he had been born before the marriage.

He left no children, so the estates and Langenstein with them passed to his sister, Luise von Langenstein und Gondelsheim (1825-1900).

In 1848 Luise married Carl Israel Vilhelm Graf Douglas (1824-1898), a Swedish noble descended from Robert Graf Douglas (1611-1662), a Scot who served as a field marshal in Swedish pay during the Thirty Years' War and who founded the Swedish comital line of Clan Douglas, a line that has produced several notable politicians and soldiers. Langenstein has been the family's principal residence since 1906.

After the end of the First World War the abdicated Grand Duke Friedrich II of Baden stayed at Langenstein for a time as a guest of Count Douglas, along with his wife, his mother Luise and his sister Viktoria, by then Queen of Sweden.

Wilhelm Graf Douglas opened a carnival museum at Langenstein in 1969, and it occupied the schloss until 2018; the museum society then built a replacement close by, which opened in June 2025. Its Alefanzorden has been given out each carnival season since the 1970s, the recipients put forward by several "Loschoren": Walter Fröhlich took it in 1977, Bruno Epple in 1998 and Günther Oettinger in 2020.

From the late 1980s Axel Graf Douglas (born 1943) built up the country club at Langenstein, with an eighteen-hole golf course and a clubhouse near the schloss, riding stables and a shotgun hunting course, its facilities open to guests as well as members. In 2014 he sold the castle and all its lands to his cousin Christoph Graf Douglas (1948-2016). Christoph's son Leopold Graf Douglas, born in 1989 and of the Swedish-German branch of Clan Douglas, lives in the schloss with his family and looks after the South Baden property together with his brother Ludwig Graf Douglas.