In the next year he was appointed Professor Extraordinary for Analytical and Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the chemical laboratory of H. von Pechmann at the University of Tübingen.

[1] In October, 1898, he was appointed to the Chair of General Chemistry in the Agricultural University of Berlin, fully training his assistants by himself, and received his habilitation in 1900.

[1] The experiment for which Buchner won the Nobel Prize consisted of producing a cell-free extract of yeast cells and showing that this "press juice" could ferment sugar.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered in the Imperial German Army and rose to the rank of Major, commanding a munition-transport unit on the Western and then Eastern Front.

On 11 August 1917, while stationed at Focșani, Romania, he was hit by a shell fragment in the left thigh and died in a field hospital two days later.