UPDATE / EAST GERMAN CAPITALISM : Marketing Is Message at Checkpoint : The Marlboro Man and other ads portend economic evolution.

For Germans who think they have seen just about everything in the last seven months, there is more to come.

Checkpoint Charlie, the frontier crossing in Berlin that for years symbolized the Cold War and the stark, gray Marxist police state that lay beyond it, has become the province of the Marlboro Man.

His flinty features appeared on a billboard there not long ago. He has since been papered over with an ad for Philip Morris Lights, but ad agency executives say he will be back soon.

Like late-blooming spring flowers, a cluster of billboards sprouted in mid-May on the grim gray concrete blocks of what remains of the Berlin Wall, brightening the drab surroundings with the likenesses of attractive women and enticing messages such as “Game for anything!”

It is all a measure of the dizzying change that has overwhelmed Eastern Europe since the Communist regimes began crumbling last year.

For many people, the very idea of such ads is difficult to grasp, especially those who know Checkpoint Charlie as the place where U.S. and Soviet tanks squared off in the tense autumn of 1961.

“The sacred cow of socialism is being slaughtered right here,” an East German passport control officer observed recently as he handed back a visitor’s documents. shaking his head with a smile. “It’s awful.”

“It’s our future,” a colleague put in.

The spectacle of the Marlboro Man on a wall thrown up by a police state to protect itself from Western influence carries deeper messages about the future.

For East Germany’s state-owned advertising agency, Dewag, and East German officialdom in general, it demonstrates both an unexpected imagination and the stirrings of entrepreneurial spirit--encouraging signs for the economic prospects of a united Germany.

For Philip Morris, and the makers of Camels and the West German brand HB, who also advertise there, the billboards are simply good business. For $7 a day, they get the attention of thousands of people.

“It’s what we call ‘quality, high-contact,’ ” said Richard Reschke of the Frankfurt-based advertising agency Michael Conrad and Leo Burnett, who placed the ads for Philip Morris.

Perhaps not for long, though. U.S. military authorities announced Wednesday that they plan to dismantle the checkpoint on the Western side, and the East is likely to follow suit.

The Marlboro Man makes his appearance at a time when the ubiquitous symbol of the Marxist state, the hammer and the drawing compass, is fading out, the Berlin Wall is coming down and fresh fruit is becoming available.

For many, this drumbeat of change is disorienting.

“It’s difficult to explain what all this means for us,” an East Berlin office worker, Petra Falkenberg, told a reporter. “It’s as if someone has opened a big new door, and just as you begin to absorb what’s in front of you, someone opens another door.”

The doors that have brought Western-style freedom and opportunity have also let in problems: unemployment, refugees from other parts of East Europe, urban squatters, street gangs.

In a place where order and security and predictability have long been regarded as redeeming virtues, the adjustment is considerable. Indeed, a kind of surreal quality hangs over East Germany as the countdown continues toward union with West Germany.