>>16549590
Nope, they were fucked. Maybe if they went full North Korea and just shot any dissenters they could've survived for a little while longer, but without some larger patron state like China on their borders they would've just been invaded by NATO.

>>16549590
Absolutely. But why though?

>>16549590
Economic reforms with increased levels of terror. When North Korea was in the same position they've sort of reinvented capitalism through bribery, the factory managers had their wages slashed but they could defraud a certain amount of money from their factory's income, which brought back the profit incentive. This led to them taking contracts from South Korea and recovered the economy as much as you can claim it recovered. I think this is perfectly doable for Eastern Germany, just take the contracts from Western Germany(in fact their industrialists will lobby for the status quo to remain once the relationship stabilizes).
The problem from there on are debts, but IMF is usually willing for some restructuring loans, as long as they don't touch the now necessary isolationism it's fine.

Communism is sort of interesting because you can subvert the economics to be workable and keep the ability of sovereign action over them during emergency, while also having a mass of retards in western academia championing you for some god forsaken reason, since in the modern world they have some influence over decisionmaking via think tanks and other advisory bodies this basically means you won't get the kind of sanctions a non communist state doing what you do would get.

However the reason why it didn't happen was that nobody in the communist party was cavalier enough to do so. They've made deals with their successors and got away with any shady shit they did during the period, for whatever reason Kims didn't believe they could get away with this so they kept their power.

>>16549674
western germany was actually willing to go as far as giving east germany low cost credits (albeit they had to use them as a basis for more high cost loans) and bought political prisoners

>>16549590
Yes, German Unification.

>>16549590
No.
If you were a mid-level or below East German, there didn't seem to be anything in the current system for you, or any incompatibility such that you couldn't attain a better life in the West.
All a crackdown would do is poison the well, with its own population and with the West.
1940s Korea was less developed than Germany, and tremendous incompatibility has set in so that North Korean elites basically have no choice but to continue the current system by any means necessary.