Dorsch attended a trade school, took piano lessons, and had her first engagement aged 15 as a choir singer at the Staatstheater, performing Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Despite Dorsch's negative attitude towards the operetta, for financial reasons she decided to commit herself as a soubrette soprano in Mainz in 1908, going to Berlin in 1911 to perform at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

Her greatest success was in the title role of Franz Lehár's operetta Friederike, which premiered on 4 October 1928 at the Neues Schauspielhaus.

Dorsch and her childhood friend Hermann Göring took advantage of interventions for racially threatened or politically persecuted colleagues,[3] such as the Kabarett artist Werner Finck, who was released from the Esterwegen concentration camp on 1 July 1935.

[5] In 1956, she caused a media sensation when she also slapped the Austrian theater critic Hans Weigel in front of a Vienna café.

She is buried at the cemetery of Bad Saarow-Pieskow alongside ex-husband Harry Liedtke and his wife Christa Tordy.