KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — I know, I know. This is hopelessly tribal.

Unless you count the day I spent three weeks ago at Ramstein, I’ve never been to Germany. Now I’m at the Barbarossahof hotel, an elegant 150-year old inn about 20 minutes outside the base, a short drive on the Autobahn — all it’s cracked up to be, by the way — through calming verdant hills. The tiny towns along the way are small cottages with burnt-orange rooftops, looking like gingerbread houses, plopped along the landscape out of someone’s imagined Teutonic heritage. Kaiserslautern itself has a nice high street that allows modern architecture to peek in without disrupting the history of the town, exactly as enlightened urban planners would like. It’s beautiful.

So naturally I thought about six million Jews being persecuted, rounded up and exterminated in places like this. As we drove to the hotel, I noticed a set of old train tracks along the side of the road and felt ill, thinking about all my relatives and their friends who might have traveled on those tracks to their doom. There’s a lot of elderly people in this hotel — where the staff has been lovely to me — and in a bout of ethnic paranoia, I don’t like being around them, even as I just smiled at a kindly old man as he passed me by in the lobby. All the gingerbread houses I saw made me flash on the word Judenrein.

This is irrational of me. I am not reasoning sensibly. But, as I say, I’ve never been here before. Maybe this is a jolt or a shudder that Jewish travelers need to feel the first time they visit, to orient us in the past and to prepare ourselves for a more peaceful present. I didn’t come here as any sort of political act. I’m passing through to get home from covering a war. But I feel like an older Germany has found me, somehow, and not in a way I ever want to be found.

I will, however, enjoy the beer.