Associations are the mechanism that ZWave uses to tell a device to send data to another device. If they are not configured, then devices will not send data unless they are polled (which will add huge latency).
What version of the binding are you using? If you’re not on the latest snapshot (or the 2.4 M4 build) then I would suggest to try this.
If you are already on this binding, then if you provide a log of the device initialisation I’ll take a look. There is an option in the HABmin thing menu to reinitialise the device - please grab the debug log showing the transactions that occur after this (you will need to wake up the device once you do the reinitialisation).