In the course of the reform of school curricula in Germany during the seventies, there were chairs of Fachdidaktik established for the different subjects at most universities. These chairs where mainly concerned with the development, evaluation and improvement of teaching conceptions and of single teaching units, but hardly with research. This was the reason why the universities aimed at getting rid of Fachdidaktik from the beginning of the nineties onwards, supported by representatives of educational policy. In order to prevent the abolition of these disciplines and assert equal academic status two initiatives were taken: Firstly, Fachdidaktik started to do empirical research. Secondly, a professional association for Fachdidaktik was formed which looks after common interests of and furthers the cooperation among all the different subject-specific disciplines of Fachdidaktik. In my paper, I will address both initiatives. I will describe some of the difficulties of turning a discipline which was largely content- and development-oriented into a Fachdidaktik geared towards empirical research. I will also address the help we got from empirically minded pedagogical psychologists and educational scientists. Furthermore, I will deal with consequences of this special change for the focus of scientific work (e.g. danger of neglecting detailed reconstruction of subject knowledge).