That depends on when the GDR should be rescued:
From 1989 on it was pretty much impossible - without Soviet loans (which would not exist because the Soviet Union needed every ruble) or West German loans, the country would have gone bankrupt by the end of 1990 and would have collapsed.
If the GDR had previously been able to develop a kind of Hungarian "goulash communism" or even a Yugoslavian model, the country could well have survived. Reunification was not a political necessity in 1989 - most demonstrators on the streets did not want reunification until mid-November (even after the fall of the Berlin Wall), but a (socialist) democratic GDR. For people born after 1949, reunification was just as "inevitable" as a "reunification" of Austria with Germany.
What forced reunification in the end was above all the economic bankruptcy, which was unavoidable in reality. If the GDR had been allowed to operate a sensible social and economic policy and gradually democratized, it could have survived. The renaissance of GDR culture in the 90s shows that an independent GDR could have been possible.
From 1989 on it was pretty much impossible - without Soviet loans (which would not exist because the Soviet Union needed every ruble) or West German loans, the country would have gone bankrupt by the end of 1990 and would have collapsed.
If the GDR had previously been able to develop a kind of Hungarian "goulash communism" or even a Yugoslavian model, the country could well have survived. Reunification was not a political necessity in 1989 - most demonstrators on the streets did not want reunification until mid-November (even after the fall of the Berlin Wall), but a (socialist) democratic GDR. For people born after 1949, reunification was just as "inevitable" as a "reunification" of Austria with Germany.
What forced reunification in the end was above all the economic bankruptcy, which was unavoidable in reality. If the GDR had been allowed to operate a sensible social and economic policy and gradually democratized, it could have survived. The renaissance of GDR culture in the 90s shows that an independent GDR could have been possible.