The war ended in 1918. Busoni was able to depart his Swiss confinement and resume concert tours of various countries. Europe, slowly reviving from the carnage, hastened to reclaim its surviving cultural values. Intellectual elites everywhere show the Master their respect, admiration, and love. The University of Zurich awards him an honorary doctorate. London welcomes his return to the concert stage with a series of essays by Edward Dent. The German premiere of Turandot and Arlecchino (in Frankfurt on October 15, 1918) signals the start of an energetic campaign for Busoni's repatriation to Berlin. Papers and journals, in a series of “open letters” and essays by Paul Bekker, Rudolf Kastner, and other renowned musicians, persistently demand that the government and the society of the Weimar Republic invite the Master—“the pride of German musical culture”—to come back to the city in which so much of his life and work have taken place.

Finally, despite the opposition of reactionaries headed by that same Hans Pfitzner, whom we have had cause to mention earlier, this campaign was successful. In 1920, the Berlin Academy of Art elects Busoni as a member, and the new director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, composer Franz Schreker, invites him to conduct one of the school's advanced piano classes. Busoni returns to Berlin. He is met with great honors and every manner of attention, and all his demands are met.