His weight of approximately 40 kg justified this choice, but his legs were too short and he fell back on his second ambition, to be a pastry and cake baker: this was the trade in which he was apprenticed between 1936 and 1939.
He then underwent an audition before the "International Artists' Club" in the "Dresden Skala" on 11 November 1945, after which he embarked on a career as a variety performer.
The head of culture at Dresden Radio, Ulli Busch (real name Richard Hahnewald[6]), gave him his first big opportunity to work on the radio,[7] and towards the end of the 1950s he moved into television, thanks to Heinz Quermann [de], appearing from 1959 in the by then established television variety show Da lacht der Bär [de] (literally "There the bear laughs").
Stage performance would nevertheless feature strongly through the rest of his career, and in 1961, thanks to Wolfgang E. Struck [de], Cohrs made his debut at the Friedrichstadt-Palast review theatre in Berlin.
His formula, based on "earthy Saxon humour", covered themes such as the differences between sophisticated Berlin and provincial Saxony, between "high politics" and peoples' daily difficulties, and gave public voice to the plight of the so-called "little man".
Although his performances were necessarily apolitical, his brand of humour and his contrived Saxon punning, were not appreciated by every Party Apparatchik, and in the early 1970s he was banned from writing his own material.
[9][10] The price to be paid may have appeared to include separation from his wife, Dagmar, and young son, Christopher, but as matters turned out, within a couple of months his wife and son were not merely permitted, but required, to join him in West Germany, following a decision by East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party to expel them.
Three decades of separation had given westerners little opportunity to familiarize themselves with the dialects of Saxony, and the show was produced in Bremen, which, even by West German standards, was a long way from Dresden.
The next two years were characterised by repeated stays in hospital[19] and, towards the end, a growing dependency on Morphine (Medicinal Heroin) to try and diminish the pain of the illness.
Reports also mentioned the refusal of the lawyer to deny rumours of family ructions, possibly involving money.
However, as Dagmar was taken out of intensive care a week after the shooting, the local prosecutor announced a preliminary view that Cohrs was not medically fit to be tried, and added that there was no point in placing him in investigative detention because clearly he was too ill to run away in the event of charges ever being laid against him.